On February 14th, the fourth year of Chongning in the fourth year of Emperor Huizong of Song Dynasty, the second day of Si, and at 9:15 am in the modern time.

Yue Fei was not really relieved until now.

He had thought a lot before, what was the biggest crux of the Song Dynasty?

There are not many emperors who deliberately do bad things. Apart from Zhao Gou, who killed Yue Fei, the mainstream is just confused.

The basic concept of being confused is to want to do good things but don’t know what good things are. If you treat bad things as good things, the more you work harder you will be, the worse things will be.

Except for the worst Zhao Gou, the second is Huizong. He can do anything but not be the emperor's fatal flaw, which leads to everything he does in the name of the emperor being bad things that are harmful to the Song Dynasty.

For example, he trusted the six treacherous slander, maybe he wanted to manage the national affairs of the Song Dynasty, but in fact the six treacherous thieves were all doing harm to the Northern Song Dynasty.

For example, he built Genyue and raised the Huashigang, and had the desire to change the Fengshui of Bianliang to strengthen the Northern Song Dynasty, but it made the people suffer too well and destroyed the foundation of the Northern Song Dynasty.

Cai Jing and others who supported him restarted the reform and tried to solve the three problems, but it became the fuse for the more serious problems.

In fact, Yue Fei believes that the root cause of various problems is still to reverse the black and white on the most fundamental issues.

The most fundamental question, fundamentally speaking, is that those foolish monarchs and treacherous ministers do not know what the law of nature is, and their behavior is against the law of nature.

You can look at the royal family of the Song Dynasty. From the beginning, it was contrary to the laws of nature. In the Zhao Gou and Zhao Ji dynasty, one of the more intense things was that the earth created disputes between people.

They may not all of them intentionally argue, but their behaviors have led to disputes. Of course, there are also bad emperors and officials. They just intentionally argue, such as the Yuanyou Party case.

Although these people are not too many, their energy is very high and they can dominate the government and even enforce the emperor.

Of course, none of those emperors can get rid of their responsibilities based on this.

During their reign, the principle of "hiding for the venerable" could be attributed to the scapegoat. For example, killing Yue Fei was all blamed for Qin Hui, but Qin Hui could not issue the imperial edict to kill Yue Fei, which was Zhao Gou's unique act.

At that time, there was no way to hide for the Lord, so Zhao Gou would still be his emperor; but now there is no need to hide anything for him anymore. On the contrary, he was a historical sinner, causing irreparable disasters to history by the Song Dynasty. He had to recognize his truth and guilt.

I won’t talk about the specific sins. He is also the biggest culprit who rebelled against the will of heaven. Of course, there is Zhao Ji, the father and son tied together.

Yue Fei's era was also the era when father and son were in power, so Yue Fei attached great importance to his thinking on this period.

A general concept is that the demise of the Song Dynasty was completed in this era. The Northern Song Dynasty was in the hands of Huizong, and the Southern Song Dynasty lost the hope of restoring the old territory and regaining the Central Plains in Zhao Gou, because he personally killed the only hope of the revival of the Song Dynasty - Yue Fei.

The reason why Zhao Ji and Zhao Gou, the father and son, were responsible for the demise of the Song Dynasty was because they brought all the disadvantages of the Song Dynasty to the extreme, and on this basis, they also created even worse disadvantages.

Let’s talk about the fundamental self-castration of the Song Dynasty.

This self-castration specifically refers to the use of their due functions according to normal design. It should have been powerful and efficient. This is its normal skill, but after being castrated, it becomes weak in strength and slow in efficiency. This is why the Song Dynasty was described as the origin of poverty and weakness.

Poverty and weakness were not the inevitable result of the Song Dynasty system itself, but the bad consequences caused by the self-castration of those foolish monarchs and treacherous ministers.

For example, the official system of the Song Dynasty had the largest number of officials, and the collection of these officials was equivalent to concentrating the best talents to form a strong talent pool.

Its academic performance is good, and it is inferior to all, but only high school students, the strict selection of thousands of troops to cross a single-plank bridge, and the supervision and assessment system for entering the officialdom ensured that the base of officials in the Song Dynasty was very large. In addition to other channels for entering the official ranks, this number was even larger.

In fact, those who entered the official team through the channels of title, honor, meritorious service, etc., although they did not pass the scientific examination for ten years or even studied hard all their lives, the conditions were actually very strict. Their level may not be as good as those top students in the top three, and at least they will not be lower than the average level.

In other words, these best reserve teams of officials who were backlogged in the talent pool were far higher than the actual needs of the Song Dynasty's officialdom, including the military politics.

If you give a world-wide overview, it is no exaggeration to say that the Song Dynasty's official reserves can meet the management needs of all states in the world.

Since that's the case, we have to ask the royal decision makers, what do you want to do if you implement such an official system and related systems?

If you prepare ten people and only need one person, but the basic salary must be paid to everyone, because you limit them to wait there, your salary is the only source of his life. How can the second of these three redundant, redundant staff and redundant fees be eradicated?

Here we see that the second of the three redundant staff and redundant staff were caused by the emperors of the Song Dynasty. It was a systemic ill. The royal family did not recognize it and did not correct it. Moreover, it was fundamentally corrected. Even Wang Anshi, who was exhausted and repaired it, could not solve it. The most thing Wang Anshi could do was to treat the headache and the head and feet, but the root of the disease was in the heart, and he was helpless.

Moreover, his right medicine is to treat the symptoms but not the root cause. He is to expand fiscal revenue and work with people. If the wealth does not increase, this will only aggravate the contradictions; coupled with the already contradictory wealth balance problem and unreasonable tax burden, the reform can only add fuel to the fire.

To give a brief example, the tax burden of ordinary people has reached the maximum. As long as you add another straw, they will collapse and go bankrupt. How can you increase taxes to them and still allow them to survive? Everyone knows that if they cannot survive, even the existing taxes cannot be guaranteed.

And for those who don’t have a tax burden or are relatively light, how do you make them pay more? The general tax law provisions do not solve the problem at all.

A reform, before it is released, you know that it cannot solve the problem at all, and instead will cause many new contradictions. Resolving this problem and contradiction, even if it is to implement new regulations, requires more officials and costs.

The fundamental purpose of the reform is to reduce redundant staff and expenses. Wouldn’t you go in the opposite direction?

It can be seen from this that a general was unable to exhaust the three armies, and the same was true in the officialdom. The emperor was simply wrong, and the officials below could not solve the problem even if they were exhausted.

Just a slight change of content makes the problem even more serious, which is the effect of an emperor being stupid and exhausted from the court.

It can be seen that if you want to reform, not only reform, but everything is the same. There are two prerequisites.

First, the emperor's unwavering support.

Second, the emperor knows what is right and promotes the right things.

This is a fundamental principle, the emperor understands and follows the laws of nature/the way of heaven.

Unfortunately, there was no such emperor in the Song Dynasty.

Especially during the rebellious days of Emperor Huizong and Emperor Gaozong, they reached the pinnacle in the direction of rebellion against the laws of nature, and no normal emperor had ever gone as far as they did.

Going back to the issue of regulatory design leading to redundant staff and redundant fees, thus forming a super large official team.

If you think this disadvantage is just causing people to lose money and financially and end up here, you are too naive.

The water in the Song Dynasty was much deeper than this, and redundant staff and expenses were just a superficial problem. Of course, redundant troops were also related to this.

As we all know, once there are too many people, various problems related to the number of people will naturally arise, and if there are too many officials, there are especially unique characteristics.

For example, if a county magistrate is vacant, there are twenty people who are qualified to be a member of it. What are the problems that arise?

First, twenty people are qualified, not that the conditions for twenty people are exactly the same. So how to select one of twenty people is knowledgeable, very particular, very articles, very questions, and even very mysterious.

There are so many recommendations for those involved in this election and appointment, and from the officialdom of the Song Dynasty, which formed cliques, everyone has their own set of supporters. I don’t know how many people will be involved in the battle around this candidate.

This also involves the size of the energy of those people and even the size of their financial resources. These things are particularly complicated to mix together.

How can those standards be clear and hard indicators? Many things are operational soft content, which increases a wider range of struggles and diversity of results. Perhaps objectively, there were only twenty people, but after some operation, they became forty people.

That is, those candidates who were not qualified could only recruit the county magistrate and county magistrate. After some operation, they would also compete for the county magistrate.

Of course, if this county magistrate is a fat and more senior official, he might join in.

According to the Song Dynasty official customs, every official assigned to the office had five or six ranks corresponding to it, which further increased competitors.

Such a huge competitor is of superior conditions as a base, but it cannot guarantee that the person selected is the most qualified person.

In most cases, it is the opposite. What is the reason?

This principle is actually very simple, that is, the farther one is from the qualified conditions, the harder he will strive to achieve.

For example, someone else only spent 1,000 taels of silver as lubricant, but he was willing to take out 1 million taels of silver to open the joints.

So, who has a higher chance of being selected? Isn’t it obvious that the lice on the bald head?

Whether a person meets the requirements for meeting the county magistrate is a soft standard, but the money is hard.

This brings a very bad consequence: bad money drives good money.

That is, the alternate officials who are not willing to rush to the camp continue to sit on the bench, while those who are good at rushing to the camp and not going the right path are full of officialdom.

This consequence is caused by the huge number of candidates for officials, which is what the emperor should recognize and solve.

It was the emperor's mistake that caused no good people in Hongdong County, and good people could not stand in the court for a long time.

On the contrary, if only one person is qualified, he will be allowed to go without saying a word.

How much trouble has been saved, how much money has been reduced? How much trouble has been reduced? How much efficiency has been improved?

More importantly, how much improvement should the moral standards of the Song Dynasty officialdom be improved?

Even the emperor's level will be improved. After all, there is no treacherous ministers, and he will have no direction to betray him.

Too many people and many things may lead to the worst people in power. This is only one aspect, and too many people and cause trouble is the biggest problem.

Second, how much trouble did the remaining nineteen people cause?

Because of the failure of the election, the person who lost the election has a common enemy, the county magistrate who successfully took office.

From the first day, getting him down has become an obvious target for everyone. It is expected that all kinds of legal and illegal means will emerge one after another, from these old opponents to come one after another, and of course there are attacks from new opponents.

Every year, new forces who have successfully conducted new science and technology examinations join the competition, and they naturally push the older generation further.

The effect is that more people come to the county magistrate and become a vital force to fight against him.

It is inevitable to find fault with him by nitpicking. He can make him disappear in this world, at least in the Song Dynasty.

Faced with such a harsh working environment, how much energy can that county magistrate have to do his job well?

This is measured from the external environment.

What if it looks at it from his own perspective?

He was originally a county magistrate who relied on his career to take up the position of county magistrate. He had limited seriousness and was probably to maintain the status quo.

It has to be said that it was without interference and distraction.

In the Song Dynasty's official environment, don't expect that thing.

Taking various factors into consideration together, he felt that it was probably difficult for him to work until the end of his term and even more difficult to achieve results.

Then we must seize the time to achieve our primary goal.

The primary goal is of course making money. The prerequisite for making money is of course to get back the money spent on the original business.

Once the two things of making money and making money enter his ruling goal, they will destroy and forcefully promote their own track.
To be continued...