The permanent presence of the wolf's ears
Carlos Garriga, vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, in 'La Contra' The Vanguard He said that "it's not Spaniards and their salaries who determine the cost of living, but tourists and visitors." The phrase is a good summary of a complex situation. Two practical exercises:
Exercise A. An outline of a crisis in the restaurant industry has opened a window of information on prices in the Balearic Islands. Not many days ago, a leader of the employers' association explained how some restaurants are changing their menus in order to lower prices and stem the loss of customers. It could be titled as the discrepancy between the purchasing power of many tourists and the high prices of the restaurant offerings, while the public directly suffers the consequences of this inflation.
The employers' association itself attributed the high prices to factors such as energy, water, and personnel costs, and, in some cases, the renewal of leases. Let's look at the statistics: Spain has an electricity price below the European average, the lowest of the leading economic powers in the Union. Water rates for domestic consumers in the Balearic Islands could easily double the national average. Despite experiencing significant growth in recent years, reaching a recent all-time high, the average salary in the Balearic Islands remains somewhat lower than the national average and is not only far behind the wealthiest European countries (Luxembourg, Germany, France), but also significantly lower than the EU average.
Beyond the laws of supply and demand, the lack of statistical support for the employers' argument denotes the plurality of factors that influence the idea of tourism as the main determinant in price formation in a tourist-driven society. Factors such as island status, which generates additional costs for goods, seasonality, which requires maximizing profits in a short period of time, the existence of obsolete supply, which attracts tourist segments with low quality demands, and also the unpredictable lack of control over vacation rentals, should be taken into account in this process.
Exercise B. These same days, the DM published the news of a real estate developer that had launched a crowdfunding project or crowdfunding (a model that is the antithesis of cooperative housing) for the construction of four luxury villas in Establiments. The advertising claim guaranteed "a high potential for property appreciation due to growing demand and limited supply." Real estate brochures have long spoken only of investment returns. In that case, the homes will go on the market for a price between 2.7 and 4 million euros. This is surely the second-home paradise in Europe imagined by the People's Party years ago.
The new formula represents a perverse democratization of urban speculation and a further step in the "Balearicization" of the territory. First it was construction companies, then venture capital funds, and now it's small investors through crowdfunding fostered by intermediaries. A true symbol of the performance society. A further step in the technological sophistication of a relationship with the Balearic Islands based solely on the idea of profit. The message is clear: the Balearic Islands are the right place to become a winning capitalist; if you don't, it's your fault.
From the eroticism of power, we move on to the pornography of power, in a permanent desecration of the territory and the exercise of violence against social and constitutional rights. A master's degree in the hell of speculation, or simply in neoliberal and post-capitalist freedom. Overall, we would be talking about a colonial relationship without a defined metropolis, a formula fostered by the relocation of capital, albeit effective in transferring common and necessary goods—such as privately owned developable land—to an external sphere of power. The extractive zeal would be the basis of the relationship; ownership of capital takes a backseat. The capital could even be of local origin, in which case the exploiter would also be the exploited.
Corollary. The PP and Vox celebrated July 18th with gusto by approving the Law on Urgent Actions Aimed at Obtaining Land Through Strategic Residential Projects in the Balearic Islands in Parliament. Colonialism definitely doesn't exist without a collaborationist government. In the twofold exercise posed in this article, the system's greatest trap, in the first instance, consists of pitting small and medium-sized businesses against workers (reduced to the status of a paycheck), blaming them for high salaries, and then blaming the Spanish government for labor reform and other social reforms that ignore self-centered greed.
Regarding housing, the greatest coercion consists of fabricating an apparent freedom for individuals to pursue their own life plans, while the government puts more developable land on the market, which will only fuel the speculative greed of the real estate market itself and the large funds that control it. Ignoring, in this case, the fact that the housing problem is not individual, but structural, affecting broad segments of society, and that only by placing limits on the market will it be possible to find solutions. This is the crux of the matter; in both cases, behind the false solutions, the thinking and wolf ears of the radical right emerge.
