INFLATION AND DEFLATION 947
they erroneously believed it was the only material suitable for currency and had
been in use for the entire three hundred years of the dynasty. In short. Yun dis-
missed the experience of the seventeenth century in the spread of cash to make
it appear less important than it was.
Prince Yohung and Yun Sun agreed on moral grounds that cash had to be abol-
ished because it caused evil. Prince Y6hi1ng claimed that cash was responsible
for turning the human mind toward deception, dishonesty, thievery, and ban-
ditry. Yun wanted to abolish it because it was so light in weight and represented
so much value that its very existence made it an irresistible object for thievery,
embezzlement, and bribery. Cash attracted peasants into commerce and away
from agriculture to satisfy their hopes for easy profits, stimulated trickery and
deception in commerce, and increased the indebtedness of the poor peasants to
the wealthy moneylenders. He also believed that cash loans to peasants had even
multiplied interest rates from the nominal 50 percent per season to an actual
750 percent, even higher than Cho W6nmy6ng's estimate.
Yun pointed out that as more people gained exemption from registration or
payment of the military support tax by fair means or foul, thc tax base had been
narrowed to the so-called yangmin, an ever-narrowing group of men who were
still retained on the military support tax rosters. The burden of this tax had been
increased by the usurious loans that the taxpayer had to incur to finance pay-
ment of the tax. A small family might have to borrow four yang of cash (worth
eight mal of rice on the market?) to obtain enough cloth to pay the military sup-
port tax (panp '0) in the spring, and they would have to repay eight yang (not six
yang?) in the fall, which could then be converted to five to six scJm (75-90 mal).
The peasants were stripped clean by this burden, and were understandably over-
joyed when Yongjo decreed that taxes be collected in cloth. not cash.
Yun thought that because it was cash itself that permitted moneylenders to
force cash loans on peasants in the spring and recoup more than ten times the
principle in the fall, the regressive military support tax was only an exacerbat-
ing factor rather than a prime cause of peasant destitution. He was unconvinced
by the argument already put forward by a number of officials that inequities
caused by the shortage of cash could be redeemed by increasing the money sup-
ply, for he asserted that ifYongjo now decided to mint one million yang of cash
to ease the shortage, it would only end up in the hands of the rich and make the
poor peasants even more dependent on the wealthy for loans and credit. Since
the country was able to get along quite wel1 prior to the use of cash in r676 [sic],
there was no reason to think that it would be impossible to abolish its use. He
did not even broach the question of whether an increase in the money supply,
or a "cheap money" policy. would have cut debt burdens on peasants who had
contracted loans in cash.
Royal Secretary Chong Uju, who also agreed that cash should be abolished
because of the problems it had caused, disagreed with Yun Sun's analysis of
the priority of evils associated with the military support tax and the burden of
peasant taxation and debt. From his experience as magistrate in nine districts