Chapter 25 Three Mechanisms of Official Trade

Published time: "China News Weekly", April 2005, No. 13 In the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Liu Shaoqi mentioned a phenomenon: "Some people regard the areas and departments they are in charge of as personal capital and independent kingdoms." After more than 50 years, these "personal capital" and "independent kingdoms" officials It has entered the "market" circulation in some places. However, assuming that Suihua City really became an independent kingdom of Ma De, would he definitely buy officials and nobles?Actually not necessarily.Because it is not cost-effective to do so, the predecessors calculated and posted.

The Qing Dynasty had a donation system. In case of war or famine and financial difficulties, the imperial court would make a large number of donations and sell officials for emergency.At this time, the opponents will settle the accounts for the emperor, saying that this kind of business is not worthwhile. If people spend money to buy officials, they must double the money back, search the people, and finally destroy the country, and the emperor will suffer.The emperor also admitted it, but he had another reason: he could not let the people starve to death or the rebellion spread, and he could not rob the rich, so he had to sell his officials as an emergency.Don't sell it when you recover.In short, under normal circumstances, everyone thinks that selling an official is not worthwhile.

Ma De's selling of officials is different from the emperor's selling of officials.First of all, the official position does not belong to his family, what he sells is his temporary agency's personnel rights.Second, the income is entirely self-owned, not used for disaster relief.Again, the world is not his Ma family's world, and his Ma family will not bear the consequences of betraying an official. In this comparison, we can see a mechanism of selling officials that is worse than "family world", that is, the mechanism of "official world". Li Gang is selling an official to his subordinates, he is selling other people's things.Ma De sold his official position to Li Gang, and he was also selling other people's things.Han Guizhi sells an official to Ma De, but what he sells is still someone else's stuff.At least in the transactions of the four links that can be verified, each trader is not the master, but a temporary agent, and they are all pursuing the immediate interests of the agent.

In the mechanism of the official world, people can only expect officials to rely on superhuman morality to fight against the trend of interests.This kind of confrontation is definitely effective, but Mudd believes that the effect is limited. He even suggested that discipline inspection officials go down and conduct destructive experiments to see if they can withstand the trend of buying officials and giving gifts. If we don't see Mudd as a natural villain, we have no reason to ignore the tragic experience of those who have lost their footing. From the perspective of public goods, taxes and services, official positions and votes are essentially transactions.Trading is not terrible, but what is terrible is the lack of a tit-for-tat response mechanism. Those who suffer losses cannot fight back, and those who commit crimes will not suffer retribution.

We can see a prototype of this closely related mechanism of retribution in village-level auditions.There, even in the worst case, when there is election bribery, the money from selling officials goes into the pockets of the people.In this mechanism, people don't need to expect superhuman morality. As long as the parties know how to protect their own interests and are not willing to suffer losses again and again, roughly fair transactions will be realized.For example, in the case of bribery, voters find that they have elected a corrupt official, and the votes sold for 100 yuan have resulted in an additional exorbitant tax of 200 yuan. They will learn their lesson and stop doing this kind of loss-making business.When the master buys and sells his own things, he will naturally choose the best goods, and strive to sell his rights at the highest price.This is the mechanism by which citizens recruit public servants.