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 even broaden it: as a general principle, where individual rights clash with the common good, it is the individual right that must recede. Never the common good or the interest of society. In a housing emergency situation, an individual —be it an individual, a real estate company, or an investment fund— does not have the "right" to speculate with the prices of rent and sale of housing. In a climate crisis situation, 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, situation, 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 that 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 turbocapitalist, 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. It is not new in human history, but if for some decades we have prided ourselves that the West was the most advanced area on the planet, it was precisely because work had been done in the opposite direction to all this.To try to ground this ideology in the figure of the good Catalan (or the good Mallorcan) who has toiled like a beast all his life and now has the right to do whatever he wants with the houses and flats 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 (and this one, liberal) idea of the distribution of wealth 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 houses and flats of the grandparents to the highest bidder, which curiously are the vulture funds). The right to decent housing, let us repeat, must prevail over the right to property.
