894 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
to achieve this was by restraining the accumulation of vast estates by limiting
the maximum amount of land that any individual or family might own or pos-
sess (hamnin myl'ingjl'in).
Ma did not comment on the rather obvious failure of this tactic in the Han
dynasty because it was not that important for his argument. He wanted to make
the point that the imposition by the state on the rights of ownership over real
estate had been deemed an acceptable tactic, but no one had ever thought of
achieving the same objective by limiting the amount of cash that anyone could
accumulate. The reason for this was that most understood that the "purpose" of
accumulating cash was not to aggrandize wealth, but to create "liquidity and
circulation" in the flow of goods (yut'ong). Therefore, there was no need for the
ruler to establish laws to instruct people in trade or the exchange of goods.
He understood that Hsien-tsung's restriction on the amount of cash that could
be accumulated had been instituted because the shortage of cash in the market-
place had driven up its value and deflated the price of goods, and he did not
question Hsien-tsung's judgment that the cause was the greed of hoarders and
profiteers. But he opposed limiting their cash possessions because he felt that
the avaricious could be more easily controlled by allowing people to impeach
them for their behavior without disrupting the flow of currency throughout the
market. He also pointed out that in practice the method just did not work: a sim-
ilar limit on the volume of cash savings in the shao-hsing period (I 13 I -63) of
the Southern Sung period had failed miserably.2^7
Yu Hyongwon did not comment on the contrasting methods of Emperor Hsien-
tsung and Ma Tuan-lin, but it is obvious that he shared Ma's point of view with-
out denigrating Hsien-tsung's attitude and purpose. Yu, after all, was a moralist
who must have shared Hsien-tsung's distaste for the more egregious forms of
avarice. but he was also convinced of the classical dictum about the immense
utility of cash as the penultimate lubricant for the circulation of goods. The cir-
culation of goods was a positive good, but not because it permitted all individ-
uals the opportunity to become rich; rather it ensured a flow of necessities to
the population at large once an economy had passed beyond the stage of rural
self-sufficiency for all products. Thus, Yu must have agreed with Ma when he
concluded that avarice could not go unpunished, even though the possession of
vast amounts of wealth would be regarded as a mark of high accomplishment
in a capitalist world, let alone a sign of the Devil's work. But that punishment
had to be done without disrupting the flow of cash or stable prices that would
occur if everyone were forced to divest themselves of surplus cash and flood
the market with it. Cash was, after all, a function of the market that operated
according to rules that the sages had already discovered, and those rules should
not be violated even if the purpose was to punish immorality.
Lii Tsu-ch 'ien: The Solid Penny Cash. Ma Tuan-lin opposed artificial limits
on the possession of cash because he felt cash was necessary for the exchange
of goods, but he still was uneasy about the stimulus to profit through the manip-
ulation of money because profiteering, itself, was immoral. He was not, of course,