The big man has a living father

Chapter 240 What I’m Best At
Xiao Guang: "In fact, the value of copper will definitely not be half of what it used to be. Don't forget the news from the research institute. Soon the Han will start using electricity, and the wires can only be copper wires."

"In the future, the price of copper will skyrocket, much higher than it is now."

"That's why the Minister of Agriculture wanted the currency to be unpegged to metal, to free up copper."

"If we start hoarding copper now, we can still sell it at four times the current price or even higher in a few years. One loss and one gain, in fact, we have doubled our money."

But at this time, everyone was silent.

During the fastest growing period of the Han Dynasty, would it be profitable to convert all assets into copper which would appreciate by one times every five years?

If an ordinary person can do it, there is a 10% chance that he can do it.

But since I have a lot of capital, what can't I make money with? I can just go to the research institutes and buy a few patents, invite a few researchers to dinner to win their hearts and minds, and get them to cooperate together, and open a few more companies. I don't know how much money I can make.

However, if we are blind and give up, then when the Han Dynasty's economy no longer develops rapidly in the future, the imperial court can use paper money to reap us at any time.

This is so uncomfortable.

It is not right to block it, nor is it right to let it go.

Cao Xiang saw their dilemma and said, "You have to pay for what you gain. We can't take all the benefits. Even Your Majesty has given up a lot."

"The Grand Minister of Agriculture has given up even more."

"Tell me about it."

Someone asked: "Marquis Pingyang, do you know why Huo Hai wants to launch paper money at this time?"

Cao Xiang took a deep breath and said, "Because...all the surface coal mines and shallow coal mines near the Tongguan Coal Mine have been mined out after eight years."

"Now, the Tongguan coal mine must split up all the technology and manpower and delegate them to various places."

"That is to say, local development in the next few years will be very scary, so money is needed."

Everyone suddenly understood something.

It’s not that Huo Hai chose this time, but Huo Hai was not prepared. However, by this time, the coal has been mined out, and paper money must be introduced, otherwise the market will collapse!
"If the market collapses..." Xiao Guang: "It seems that our money will become scrap metal, so the Minister of Agriculture is not afraid of us causing trouble, because we will not commit suicide."

Cao Xiang sighed: "My wife said the same thing."

Cao Xiang knew nothing about economics, but now he was married to the daughter of a wealthy businessman. With this powerful combination, the Cao family's development momentum was even stronger.

Everyone looked at each other, and they were all feeling suffocated again. They wanted to exert their strength but didn't know where to put it.

"Is the Grand Minister always like this?!"

"Wait a minute, if Tongguan Coal Mine wants to expand its coal mining rights, then... can we replicate the Huo family's success in the local area?"

“This is the new battlefield!”

Soon, the group made up their minds.

There are traces of how Huo Hai rose in business and led Changan to rise.

As long as we learn from Huo Hai and use the same deployment in other places, won’t we succeed?
Besides, no one has the idea of ​​replicating Changan’s huge success. They just want to have a little bit of Changan’s momentum, which will be enough for them to make money.

Even though some people in this group were not convinced, they quickly acknowledged this point.

This is the biggest problem of businessmen, short-sightedness.

They had no capital and did not have the courage to plan for three generations, while people like Liu Che had the courage to plan for a hundred generations. In fact, it was because Qin Shihuang had done a terrible job of planning for ten thousand generations that Liu Che only asked for a hundred generations.

If it were the end of the Ming Dynasty, that group of bureaucrats, capital, officials in public and smugglers in secret who controlled global shipping and those Jiangnan bureaucrats who plucked the string of silver would probably never compromise, but would definitely fight to the end.

But it was useless. Although the Jiangnan bureaucrats were powerful, they were sold out by their counterparts in the north.

The characteristic of capital is that everything can be sold; the only thing missing is the price.

For capital, everything can be sold, including class stance.

……

At this time, Huo Hai had just come out of the palace.

Sitting in the car, not ready to leave yet.

It was only during this moment in the car that Huo Hai had absolutely nothing to do with the royal family, so he sat there for a while longer.

Jiang Buyi asked, "Sir, why is it that after the news of this paper currency was revealed, there was almost no substantial resistance?"

In Jiang Buzhi's opinion, based on his experience, this news should be boycotted by the entire nation.

The entire Han Dynasty, from the royal family to the slaves, everyone should be against paper money.

But the fact is that almost no one opposed it, from kings and nobles to slaves.

Apart from those who want to become famous through this, almost no one speaks out on this matter.

Isn't this strange?

Huo Hai: "Bu Yi, you have to remember that debate is not based on facts."

Jiang Buyi: "I know, it depends on eloquence. As long as the voice is loud, it can overwhelm the senses brought by the facts."

Huo Hai shook his head: "I was just fooling others. If this is the truth, how come no one has been able to beat me over the years? Am I always shouting loudly when I do something?"

Why was the news of the paper currency revealed in advance? Because Liu Che had concerns.

Now the Han Dynasty has finally reached this point, and it is almost visible to the naked eye that it possesses the power to unify the world.

Liu Che now had only two plans: to build four railways within the territory of the Han Dynasty, and one to the east to Qiancheng.

One goes south to Chengdu.

A line running northward connects the energy sources discovered in the snowfields south of the desert and in the north.

One goes west and leads directly to the Pamir Pass.

As long as the four railways are built, no one will be able to rebel against the Han Dynasty under the current situation.

And all this is not just empty talk.

After Xiang Xu took office as the general manager of Anluo Railway, he has been accumulating various experiences, whether it is engineering experience, experience in building roads through mountains and bridges across rivers, experience in building tunnel gates and bridges, or experience in managing and dispatching railway trains.

Experience in all aspects has been accumulated for nearly five years.

Now that the route of the railway to the north has been discovered, construction will begin soon.

The caisson method, a technology that has existed for thousands of years, has of course reappeared in the industrial age.

The cofferdam method is not difficult either.

Many old houses in Chang'an City did not have cellars, but now that they are wealthy, they want to dig cellars to store ice that was previously only available to the nobility.

Therefore, the box enclosure method has developed rapidly.

As the box method has been developed for a long time, the cofferdam method equipment has been standardized.

Among so many construction workers, many new technologies were developed and became major engineering technologies.

At present, as long as we are willing to spare no effort, we can build a bridge across the Yellow River!

Of course, at present, the whole country can only spare manpower to build two bridges of this size. Therefore, the bridge to the north of Luoyang cannot be moved so far, and we can only build a bridge between Jiuyuan and Huaishuo first.

Even though the Yellow River here is not wide, the bridge is planned to be more than 800 meters long!
Building this bridge requires the transfer of a large amount of manpower and resources from the north.

If it were five years ago, the Han Dynasty would not have been qualified to build this bridge or plan a railway to the north.

But now it is possible.

After the Anluo Railway, Dahan has been resting for four years without any major projects.

Before the Anluo Railway, there were actually as many as four million infrastructure workers, but during the Anluo Railway period, the number was reduced to half a million.

If for no other reason than to rest the people's strength.

This adds up to five years of cultivation.

If it were someone else, there would be no way they could resist the temptation and cultivate the people's strength at this time of great development.

It is also impossible to withstand the threats and inducements from all sides.

But Huo Hai could do it, and so could Liu Che. In fact, Huo Hai was in the South at that time, and he also avoided a lot of trouble.

When asked about the big project, Liu Che simply replied, "Without Huo Hai here, it would be difficult to complete such a big project."

Everyone knows that Huo Hai put a lot of effort into these major events, but no one knows how much effort he put in.

This reason also blocked everyone.

After Huo Hai came back, he took office as Minister of Agriculture and proposed a police plan, but there were no projects in the past year and a half.

Now, it's time.

To build a road to the north at this time, we need a stable environment and no one can set the pace. Otherwise, if hundreds of thousands of tough people from the middle reaches of the Yellow River gather together, big problems will arise.

This is what Liu Che was worried about.

But this is not Huo Hai's concern.

Just like Jiang Buzhi’s doubts, many people were wondering why no one jumped out to oppose it.

They don't understand.

In fact, the issue of paper money is more suitable to be announced suddenly one day, catching everyone off guard.

Then, with the powerful pressure of the police system, everything was settled in just one month.

This is the best solution.

Why did Huo Hai deliberately release the news? It was nothing more than an experiment. If the experiment was shown to everyone, no one would object.

Huo Hai succeeded.

Success is success, others may not know why, but Jiang Buyi wants to know.

The answer is simple. Huo Hai: "The most important point in an argument is not facts or eloquence."

"Instead, at the beginning of the debate, the vast majority of people were drawn to their side."

Jiang Buyi: "Ah?"

As long as you learn this trick, it is easy to create an account online.

Jiang Buyi didn't understand.

Huo Hai: "Suppose, today, we go out on the street and follow the traffic rules, but we bump into a rickshaw driver who is carrying goods."

Jiang Buyi: "We followed the traffic rules, so it's impossible for us to hit someone. If we hit someone, it means he didn't follow the traffic rules, so it's his fault. Even if the traffic police didn't consider you as their immediate superior, they would still judge him as responsible."

Huo Hai: "But what if someone wrote an article saying, 'A high-ranking official drove a luxury car at high speed in a busy city and hit a poor driver. Is the poor man's life a fate?'"

Jiang Buyi had a look on his face that said, "Is this possible?": "!"

Huo Hai: "You understand, there are still many poor people in the world."

"Logically speaking, the vast majority of people in the world abide by the rules, and only a minority do not. So when someone sees something like this, they will speak up for the rule-abiding party."

"But if someone uses the rich-poor method to divide public opinion camps, no matter how reasonable you are, you will not be able to win the argument."

Huo Hai: "Almost everything you can think of, as long as there is room for debate, can be used in one way or another to sway the vast majority of people to one side of any argument. Whoever succeeds in swaying the majority of people has already succeeded from the beginning of the debate. The subsequent process is just the blink of an eye process of successful series connection of electric current."

Jiang Buyi: "I want to get off!"

"If that's the case, I will ban anyone from leaving their place of residence and looking for work."

This is absolutely impossible logically.

Because once you find a job, you can earn several thousand dollars a month.

How come most people are on my side?
Huo Hai took a sip of tea and said calmly: "Find a few people to publish some articles about annexing land, and then write articles analyzing how the landlords cheated the land, and then wait for it to ferment."

"Finally, it was announced that no one was allowed to leave their place of residence, to prevent landowners from forcing people to become vagrants in order to obtain land."

Jiang Buyi became serious.

It really works, right?
This sounds very convincing, as if many official documents of the imperial court in the past were similar to this. I didn’t find it strange before, but now I think that some things are not actually for the things they describe!
Huo Hai: "As long as you can get the majority of people to your side at the beginning of an argument, there is no chance of losing any argument."

Jiang Buyi finally understood what was going on.

From the very beginning, the debate over paper currency was not about whether paper currency reform would harm the rights and interests of those who currently hold copper coins.

Rather, the question is who can convince the people to believe in their own problems.

At the beginning, the news that spread was that paper money might harm the interests of big businessmen and aristocrats.

From the very beginning, the people were made aware of one thing: we are just ordinary people, and the imperial court has no time to cheat us out of our money.

There is no need to argue at all, this is the default condition.

At this time, Han spoke out and pointed out the truth.

He discovered the harm this incident caused to the nobles and businessmen, but he did not speak from this perspective. Instead, he wrote an article saying that paper money was a robbery of ordinary people.

What he said was indeed true.

Paper money does rob the 'common man'.

But the thing is, this isn’t the whole truth.

Paper money only robs ordinary people by a few percent.

For the rich, the pay is cut in half.

What people worry about is not the scarcity of money but the inequality of distribution. If there were no paper money and no one was fighting over it, then the rich would get richer, and that would be the most terrifying thing.

Huo Hai didn't mention this at all, he only talked about another thing.

Excessive money supply is not necessarily harmful. It can stimulate business and allow it to develop more rapidly.

Doing a simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division calculation, my money depreciated by 10%, but the market prosperity soared by 30%, and my assets also soared by 30%.

If you calculate it twice, you actually made 20%, right?
Therefore, when Huo Hai answered the questions, he had no intention of using logic or convincing ordinary people with logic.

Instead, we should tell ordinary people directly that over-issuance is not a bad thing. Over-issuance is a good thing for ordinary people. We are on the same side.

Is over-issuance actually a good thing for ordinary people?

Not necessarily.

Everyone has some truth in what they say, but it depends on who is more correct.

In fact, no one cares about the truth, everyone only cares about interests.

Whoever can convince himself that he is in the majority interest will be believed by everyone.

Jiang Buyi: "Well, even if that's the case, ordinary people believe that they have taken advantage, so why don't the nobles and businessmen stand up?"

Huo Hai put down his teacup and said calmly: "Because the nobles and bureaucrats also think that it is a good thing not to object."

Jiang Buyi understood.

It is that I feel that not objecting is a good thing, not that I feel that not objecting is right.

It's two different things.

Jiang Buyi suddenly understood: "It's greed."

"Greed prevents them from uniting, so they only want to take the benefits that are visible in front of them, and you threw a large piece of the benefits to them."

Huo Hai: "I threw away the bait, not any benefits."

Is the purpose of throwing bait to divide the cake?
No, the purpose of throwing bait is to catch fish!
Is this still a chain reaction?
Jiang Buzhi quickly began to analyze recent events to see if there were any matters with greater interests at stake than paper money!

Jiang Buyi found the problem immediately without even thinking: "It's the coal mine!"

----

I went back to my hometown to pick up my parents and bring them to the city to celebrate the New Year. It’s several hundred kilometers away, and as you all know, there were terrible traffic jams before the New Year. It took three days to go back and forth, and I could only write 4,000 words in these three or four days.

(End of this chapter)