"do nothing". As part of their laissez-faire policy, agricultural taxes were reduced from 1/15 of agricultural output to 1/30, and for a brief period abolished entirely. In addition, the labor corvée required of peasants was reduced from one month every year to one month every three years. The minting of coins was privatized, while Qin taxes on salt and other commodities were removed. Later opponents of taxation described the early Han as a prosperous period and lamented what they saw as overtaxation. Under Emperor Jing, ... the ropes used to hang the bags of coins were breaking apart due to the weight, and bags of grain which had been stored for several years were rotting because they had been neglected and not eaten. Severe criminal punishments, such as cutting off the nose of an offender, were abolished. Merchants and industrialists in particular prospered during this period. In the early Western Han, the wealthiest men in the empire were the merchants who produced and distributed salt and iron, acquiring wealth that rivaled the annual tax revenues collected by the imperial court. These merchants invested in land, becoming great landowners and employing large numbers of peasants. A salt or iron industrialist could employ over one thousand peasants to extract either liquid brine, sea salt, rock salt, or iron ore. Emperor Wu's policies Emperor Wu of Han (r. 141–87 BCE) viewed such large-scale private industries as a threat to the state, as they drew the peasants' loyalties away from farming and towards the industrialists. Nationalizing the salt and iron trades eliminated this threat and produced large profits for the state. This policy was successful in financing Emperor Wu's campaigns of challenging the nomadic Xiongnu Confederation while colonizing the Hexi Corridor and what is now Xinjiang of Central Asia, Northern Vietnam, Yunnan, and North Korea. Other policies included a price stabilization scheme and a tax of 10 percent on the capital of merchants and industrialists who had not yet been expropriated. However, these policies imposed great hardships on the people; banditry and armed revolts were occurring by Emperor Wu's death. Debate As complaints surfaced criticizing more and more about the government's policies, the regent Huo Guang, who was the de facto ruler of China after Emperor Wu of Han, called a court conference to debate whether the policies of Emperor Wu should be continued. The resulting debate was divided into two groups, the reformists