Since the founding of the Northern Song Dynasty, there has been a relatively complete household registration system, which divides the household registration into the main household and the customer. The main household, also known as the tax household and the household arrangement, specifically refers to the population who has real estate in the city, has land in the countryside, and should pay taxes and serve.

The main household is also divided into the main household of the square corridor (Chengguo) and the main household of the village, which is equivalent to the urban household and the rural household. The main households in the village are divided into five classes, and those whose land yields more than three percent are counted as the first class; those who are inclined from one to three are counted as second, third, and so on; No more than 50 acres is considered fourth-class; Less than 20 acres is the fifth class.

The first, second, and third-class rural households are called upper households, which are counted as landlords, and the fourth and fifth classes are lower households, which are counted as self-cultivated farmers. Some fifth-class households have only a few acres of land and have to rent other people's land for farming, even if they are semi-self-cultivated farmers.

The customers are also divided into Langfang customers and rural customers, and rural customers are called tenants, villagers, local customers, floating customers, and side households. They did not have land, and according to later popular saying, they did not own the means of production and lived by renting the landlord's land.

Rural customers do not need to pay land-related taxes to the state, but only need to pay the land rent to the landlord in accordance with the lease agreement, and the landlord is responsible for the tax on this land.

This sounds reasonable, but the question is, who owns most of the land? Clarify this issue, and a series of questions about land taxation in the imperial court will become clear.

At the beginning of the founding of the Northern Song Dynasty, in order to encourage the people to restore the cultivated land that had been abandoned due to the war, it adopted a completely different land policy from that of the previous dynasty, allowing land privatization, and whoever reclaimed it belonged to whomever owned it.

This is not wrong, it should be regarded as a step forward, and it can quickly restore the scale of agricultural production in the country. But there are two sides to everything, and the other side of land privatization is the serious phenomenon of land annexation.

How many main customers are there at this time? Coincidentally, Hong Tao knew that he had the right to access the relevant materials of the imperial court, and he had studied it when he went to the Daimyo's Mansion. According to the statistics of Yuanfeng in the past eight years, there are 16.5 million households in the country, of which more than 10 million are main households and more than 5.7 million customers.

A small number of Lang Lang customers have been removed, and the vast majority of them are rural customers, accounting for about 35% of the total number of household registrations.

There must be discrepancies in this figure, with the statistical ability and statistical means of the Song Dynasty, plus various customers who evade taxes, the discrepancies will not be too small, but in terms of the total amount, it is the most reliable data.

According to this official figure, the country's arable land should be concentrated in the hands of two-thirds of the main households. If that's the case, Hong Tao won't toss, it's normal.

But the reality is much more cruel than the numbers, and 70 to 80 percent of the country's cultivated land is not in the hands of two-thirds of the main households, but in the hands of the situation households.

The situation household, also called the official household, should know it when you hear the name, yes, it is the official. According to the laws of the Great Song Dynasty, officials at all levels were allowed to own a portion of land that was not subject to taxation, and was also exempt from forced labor.

For a first-class official like Hong Tao, his family can have 100 acres of land that is tax-free, and so on, and the ninth grade official will be reduced to five tilts. One Song is equal to 50 acres, the ninth grade official has more than 200 acres of duty-free land, and the first rank is as high as 5,000 mu.

This is not the end, Hong Tao killed dozens of temples in the Daimyo's mansion, and made more than 100,000 acres of arable land that did not belong to the temple's tax-free scope at all, and these lands were also owned by officials and landlords, and all of them were hung in the name of the temple in order to pay less taxes.

After calculating this account, it is probably clear why the farmers who actually farm the land can't live a good life. Seventy percent of the country's land is in the hands of officials, temples, and imperial villages, and no or less taxes are paid, and less than 30 percent of the land is the main force of land taxation.

If you want to use Sancheng land to feed the huge government and army of the Northern Song Dynasty, in addition to vigorously developing industry and commerce, it is inevitable to raise taxes. This is a vicious circle, because it is the rural households, the small and medium-sized landlords, who bear the majority of the taxes.

Once their burden is too heavy, and they catch up with natural and man-made disasters, they may immediately go bankrupt and become customers, and their land will become tax-free fields for government households and temples. In the long run, the number of acres of land taxed will become less and less, and the taxes of the state will become heavier and heavier, until the entire land policy and the entire landlord class will finally be crushed.

This question was not unthought of by the Northern Song court, nor did it not want to change. Why was Wang Anshi's new deal blocked by the old party? It is because the New Deal touched their interests, and a large part of them was land revenue.

If a country wants to become rich and strong, it is far from enough for the people in the city to be well fed and clothed, and for the elite class and high-ranking officials, so that the life of a large number of peasants is better.

Didn't Mencius say that those who have constant birth have perseverance, and those who do not have constant birth have no perseverance; There is no perseverance, and there is no way to ward off evil and extravagance. Hong Tao agrees with this sentence very much.

How can the burden on farmers be reduced? It's more difficult to change, or it's more difficult for Hong Tao. He was unable to persuade the emperor and ministers to change their land policy, a proposal that was more difficult to accept by vested interests than Wang Anshi's new policy.

If Wang Anshi's new policy could not quickly increase the income of the imperial court, presumably Emperor Shenzong would not support him. Now that Emperor Shenzong, who wants to make a difference, is dead, the new emperor is clearly a conservative, and he still touches the land interests of the scholar class, which is not looking for death.

To put it bluntly, it is a natural position for the government to want to collect more money, and it is also a demand that farmers want to pay less.

The government and the people are a pair of natural rivals, but they must be tied together and never abandoned. The best way is to make the two sides relatively balanced, so that the government does not collect too much and the farmers do not pay too little.

This balance point is difficult to find, human society has explored for thousands of years, so many masters and powers are stunned and don't understand it too much, and Hong Tao doesn't expect to have the ability to achieve it overnight.

The imposition of the people and the government to compete for power has two end results. First, he succeeded, led the people to kill blood, overthrew the government and established a new government. As a result, I felt in my pocket and found it empty.

If you want to build and strengthen the army, you have to collect taxes, and you can't keep it up more than the original government. Because what was destroyed by the war has to be rebuilt, and this part of the cost has to be added to the people.

Even if you don't want to accept it, but what about your subordinates? It is impossible for everyone to be a time-traveler and see thousands of years later. What are they trying to do with their heads and blood? It's not a right, if you don't give anything, then you're the one who will be overthrown.

Second, if you fail, it's even more simple, and you hit the ground with a click. The traverser is not the Monkey King, he will still die if his head is gone, or he will travel to other eras.

Hong Tao didn't want either of these results, he felt that there should be a third way, there was no need to play a zero-sum game, so that the government and the people win-win, the latter said that the least cost in exchange for the biggest change.

In Hong Tao's understanding, politics is also a business, a much more complicated business. Since it is a transaction, it is necessary to act according to the rules of doing business, and the costs and benefits must be considered.

As the saying goes, to increase revenue and reduce expenditure, reducing taxes means reducing peasants' expenditures, but now it seems that it is obviously unrealistic. So don't drill the horns, think about it differently, can there be a way to increase income?

If one acre of land can produce more grain, the peasants will have more money left, and the population per unit of land will be relatively large, and life will be better.

It is true that this will not fundamentally solve the problem of excessive government exploitation, but it may raise the level of ideological understanding of the peasants, as long as the tax revenue is not immediately raised.

As the level of awareness of the peasants increases, the difficulty of government exploitation increases. Didn't it be said in the five techniques of controlling the people, that is, the people should be one first, that is to say, the foolish people, so that the people have only one kind of thought. If the peasants have spare time and money to study, the difficulty of the people will be relatively increased.

Through the summary of these few lifetimes, Hong Tao has come to an experience, don't think about how to completely eliminate or change everything, it is best to increase or decrease step by step, and the change in dosage causes qualitative change, which is relatively feasible.

Because the idea and the result of some things are often contradictory, the original intention is not necessarily good, the first step is to start with the inconspicuous little things is the safest, even if you do it wrong, it will not cause great harm to the whole. Thinking and measuring while doing, and gradually approaching the key to the problem, it is finally possible to solve it completely.

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