The Qing army honestly stayed in the camp, strictly enforced the blockade system, and the number of people who fled to the Ming army continued to decline; And Ren Tang and Mu Tan can also continue their transportation business and send more men on the ship wholeheartedly. Now that the Ming army is completely controlled by the river, there is no need to consider safety issues, so Ren Tang lined up the prisoners, boarded the ship as soon as a ship returned, and sailed away when it was full, so that the efficiency could be maximized.

Seeing that a boatload of people sailed away from the dock of the Ming army, Ren Tang sighed to Mu Tan beside him: "These tens of thousands of people go back, it should help the price of grain." ”

Except for a small number of bosses and people who are particularly skilled in their crafts, most of the workers only work in the trading houses as a side hustle in their spare time, or to save money to save seeds and farm tools for land reclamation - at least for now, the concept of Chengdu has not changed much, and almost everyone hopes to have a piece of land that belongs to him and can be left to his children and grandchildren in the future. If it weren't for Deng Ming's prohibition of hoarding wasteland and the penalty rules for registering but continuing to abandon wasteland last year, there would have been bad businessmen who wanted to stock up on some wasteland while doing business - anyway, it used to be 10 acres and 100 yuan, and they could fully afford it; In addition to these merchants, the pillars of those trading houses who did not have the heart to become farmers at all, these masters had good skills and high salaries, so they were not interested in working in the dry soil to dig food.

The emergence of a large number of yeoman farmers led to a sharp increase in grain reserves, and last year, Chengdu's self-livelihood and Deng Ming's large amount of material brought back from Jiangnan gave the government and most of the peasant households two years of grain storage. After the wheat harvest today, a large number of bachelors have found that their 20 acres of production is enough for them to open their appetites and eat for a few years, and the government has no desire to buy too much grain. However, at that time, it was still far from the time when Deng Ming set the agricultural tax (September), so the peasants all stored their grain, and if there was a less outrageous purchase price, they would also sell some as appropriate.

Now that September is getting closer and closer, knowledgeable high-ranking officials like Ren Tang and Mu Tan can guess that grain prices will fluctuate after the rice harvest, and that a large amount of new grain will be put into storage, and everyone urgently needs IOUs to pay taxes, and the traditional problem of cheap grain hurting farmers will appear again. In fact, as early as May, Xiong Lan and Liu Jinge told Deng Ming about this, because Deng Ming no longer asked Xiong Lan to maintain food prices, so no one was sure what would fall, and Liu Jinge even asked Deng Ming, if the food price was so low that it was completely impossible to see, could it be partially taxed in kind?

However, Deng Ming disagreed, because once the tax collection in kind was resumed, the credit of the IOU would be affected, and he would rather have a headache and a cure than bear the risk of a currency crisis. Deng Ming felt that the living standards of the peasants in Chengdu were not bad, and there was no need to worry about not having enough to eat even if the price of loose grain was low, and after the tax was paid, it was probably still a problem of how to eat up the grain of a bachelor who had too much grain, and the peasants who were used to living a hard life would definitely have the action of stockpiling surplus grain, and there would be no collective selling of grain; Moreover, Deng Ming also pointed out that if farmers feel that it is too much to lose money by selling grain, they can first go to odd jobs and raise protection money for September through methods similar to wage advances.

In Ren Tang's opinion, after these captives are sent back to Chengdu and Xuzhou, they will definitely need to consume a large amount of grain, which is equivalent to hiring their bosses to buy grain from the peasants and relieve the pressure on grain prices in Chengdu.

"It might be better now, but maybe it's a poison to quench your thirst." Mu Tan has a different view.

"Drink to quench your thirst." Ren Tang corrected.

"Well, that's what it means." The people who work in the factories do not produce food, but now they are actively entering the factories except for the lesbian Xiucai, who are in large numbers of new immigrants who have just arrived in Chengdu. When the new immigrants arrived in Chengdu, they may have missed the agricultural season, and they have no long-term goods and cannot afford any production tools, so they first work in the factory, while scouting the surrounding land and rivers, secretly wondering where they want to settle down, and when the right month is right, they quit their jobs and spend all their money to buy farm tools to open up the wasteland.

In the past, whether it was from Huguang, Guizhou or Yunnan, it was basically this routine, and the vacancies of workers in the factories were always filled by newcomers. In Mu Tan's view, these Shaanxi and Shanxi people are probably no different, the workers with a little skill that they have cultivated with great difficulty last year will soon start to leave, and the new people will fill their posts, and then spend a year teaching them the craft, and then wait until next year they will still take advantage of the cheap grain prices to buy the grain and seeds for the first half of the year after the autumn harvest, and start to run their own land.

"This year is a mess, but next year there will be more land and more unsellable food; This year, the group will leave again and go to clear more land. ”

Mu Tan didn't know how to solve this problem, and Ren Tang didn't know either, and he should have traditionally persuaded farmers to do so, but now the situation in Chengdu is quite abnormal, and Mu Tan feels that it may be the same as Liu Jinge said, only when Chengdu has millions of laborers can the price of food be stabilized and will not think of the current ups and downs - that is, when the waves of immigrants fill all the lower levels, they can tend to be stable, and as the population increases, they will return to traditional intensive farming again - and that will be dozens or hundreds of years later, The western Sichuan government will continue to rise and fall in this bumpy grain price.

"In order to consume food, we need more workers, and we need to tell the bachelors to let their families have more mouths to eat." The general view in Chengdu and Xuzhou now is that if the tax in kind is not reinstated, and the IOU system is not abandoned (and silver cannot be considered as a substitute, which may be worse, and the crisis cannot be mitigated by mass printing), then the war must be waged with increasing frequency in order to delay the moment when food prices collapse and the peasants cannot afford to pay taxes.

This theoretical model was jointly proposed last year by Xiong Lan, governor of the Central Bank of China, and Qin Xiucai, director of the tax bureau, and the model is very simple, that is, it assumes that the new male population arrives every year to open up new fields in the second year, and each male has 20 acres of land, even if it is extensively managed, the output can probably be enough for at least eight people to eat, and even if a large number of pigs are raised, it cannot be reduced to less than four people. Therefore, this means that every year the new population of Chengdu must be four times that of men, and then it will have to quadruple again the next year, until all the reclaimed wasteland is filled in to survive the crisis, and in order to avoid the collapse of the IOU system, this acceleration of migration must be maintained until all the arable land in Chengdu is occupied. A large number of peasants were able to pay taxes, and the IOUs in the hands of merchants would not be turned into waste paper, and Xiong Lan, Qin Xiucai, and their staff further pointed out that if there were a large number of women in the new population, it would slow down the development of new fields - women were set in Qin's model as a population that simply ate, and over time they could produce more Chengdu residents who did not produce enough to eat - for example, if half of the new immigrants were women, the pressure of migration in the second year would not be four times but twice as high.

Deng Ming was unimpressed with this economic model, although he didn't know how to build a reasonable model, but even with the eyes of Deng Ming's modern art students, he felt that this model of Qin Xiucai of equal proportions was too simple. However, considering that this is the first economic model containing mathematical theories -- no matter how simple mathematics is mathematics, Deng Ming still highly praised Xiong and Qin, and this model has become the consensus of Chengdu bureaucrats and intellectuals. The solution to the economic crisis was then imprinted into the minds of the Chengdu bureaucracy and intellectuals (now with the addition of Principal Chen's primary school students): to speed up the plundering of the population, to ensure that at least half or even more of the female population was imported, but men were also necessary because they were needed to fill the vacancies in the factories, and these newcomers could produce more farm tools and weapons, the former being sold to the workers who had left the factories to collect money to finance the army, and the latter to arm the army for next year's war of population plundering. It's still a very rudimentary and rigid model.

Although Ren Tang and Mu Tan's experience in leading troops is much stronger than Xiong Lan and Qin Xiucai, these two people don't know anything about the economy, Deng Ming has seen the modern economic model and is immune to this, and the two of them, like Chen Zuocai, admired this model containing mathematical principles for the first time, and the more they looked at it, the more they felt perfect. Mu Tan, in particular, regards this set of theories of "plundering to alleviate the crisis, plundering to create a crisis, and increasing plunder to alleviate the crisis" as a golden rule, believing that the entire economic world is no longer mysterious.

"What is the benefit of the Admiral beating Chongqing? This kind of big victory has certainly put the crisis on hold, but for every man who enters Chengdu this year, we need four next year, and I think we should go to Shandong. Mu Tan said his opinion seriously.

"Why Shandong?"

"Because I've heard those Shandong people say -- that is, the Shandong people who defected to your Zhoushan -- that the girls in Shandong are very tall, and the amount of food can be twice as large as that of the girls in Zhejiang...... Eat a lot, be able to work, and be good at giving birth to dragons and phoenixes, what a good girl she is, isn't it exactly what we need? Mu Tan, who fully accepted the theories of Xiong Lan and Qin Xiucai, naturally accepted the solution they gave: "Moreover, Shandong has a long coastal area, and it is not too far from Susong, and the officials in Shandong have not made peace with the admiral. ”

"That's a good point." Ren Tang nodded approvingly, and sighed lightly: "We have delayed too much time in Chongqing, the Admiral should go to Jiangnan as soon as possible, and don't waste time with Li Guoying anymore." ”