The right to housing must prevail

Beyond petty politics and party strategies (in Junts they must be very sure of where they are going, voting what they vote), any debate about housing should start from this principle: people's right to decent housing is superior and must prevail over other rights, such as private property and its monetary exploitation. We can make it even broader: as a general principle, where individual rights collide with the common good, it is the individual right that must recede. Never the common good or society's interest. In a housing emergency, an individual —be it an individual, a real estate company, or an investment fund— does not have the "right" to speculate on rental and sale prices of homes. In a climate crisis, no one has the "right" to destroy the environment in the name of economic productivity, nor to question scientific evidence without valid arguments. In an epidemic, or pandemic, no one has the "right" not to get vaccinated, unless they assume that their decision endangers the health and lives of those around them (and they are indifferent to it). These are just a few examples.Some will call the previous paragraph communist, but it is not: it is simple social democracy and the welfare state, as we understood them not so long ago. The principle is simple: for societies to advance, they must do so collectively. If only a few benefit and many are harmed, there is no progress: there is regression. Illiberal, or turbo-capitalist, discourses are not an evolution of classical liberalism, but its degradation. The market, by itself, does not put everyone in their place, especially when the market is doped, inflated, and falsified in favor of very specific and describable interests. The retraction of democracy reveals another project, a new order conceived and commanded by global oligarchs with local servants in each country, imposing on rulers and populations a kind of natural selection based on money. This is nothing new in human history, but if for some decades we have prided ourselves on the West being the most advanced zone on the planet, it was precisely because we had worked in the opposite direction to all this.Trying to anchor this ideology in the figure of the good Catalan (or the good Mallorcan) who has worked his whole life like a beast and now has the right to do whatever he wants with the houses and apartments he has inherited from his grandparents, or that he has bought by speculating, is, to say the least, an indecent falsehood. Catalonia, precisely, has been a pioneer for having been a country built on the firm idea (and this one, indeed, liberal) of wealth distribution and collective improvement. In Mallorca, this idea has never existed, and that is why it is drowning in mass tourism with no alternatives in sight (and selling the grandparents' houses and apartments to the highest bidder, which curiously are vulture funds). The right to decent housing, let's repeat it, must prevail over the right to property.