Well, ain't this a surprise. News comes out of Spain — a BBC wire, of all places — that tens of thousands are out on the streets, protesting over housing. "Anger in the streets," they call it. You hear that, and if you’ve been paying attention to how these European governments have been running things, you just nod your head and say, 'Yep, saw that coming a mile away.' It's the natural conclusion when the smart folks in the big cities decide they know better than the basic laws of supply and demand.
The story says more than 50 protests are happening because the government "failed to get emergency legislation through parliament." Now, that phrase "emergency legislation" ought to set off some alarm bells for anyone with a lick of sense. What it usually means is that a problem, probably one created by previous government overreach, has gotten so bad that the politicians feel the need to *do something*. And that *something* is almost always more government, more regulations, more control. It's a snake eating its own tail, really.
You see it all the time, don't you? A government decides housing is too expensive, so they slap on rent controls. What happens? Landlords decide it's not worth investing in new properties or even maintaining existing ones because the return isn't there. Supply shrinks, quality drops, and the problem just gets worse. Or they decide to pass laws telling folks what they can and can't build, where they can build it, and how much it ought to cost. Before you know it, you’ve got a mountain of red tape and builders can’t afford to put up new homes, or they can’t get the permits. Housing supply dries up, and prices skyrocket. It's not rocket science; it's just common sense.
This isn’t some deep philosophical mystery. It’s what happens when you substitute market mechanisms with central planning and endless bureaucracy. Folks like Edmund Burke understood this centuries ago: societies thrive when they respect tradition, property rights, and the natural order of things, not when they’re subject to the whims of legislative bodies constantly tinkering with the economy. These governments, always promising to fix things, often just make them worse. They create the very crises they then claim only *they* can solve with another round of "emergency legislation."
It makes you wonder, doesn't it, what these politicians are thinking? Do they truly believe they can defy economic gravity? Or is it that the incentives are all wrong? They pass these grandiose laws, make big speeches about helping the "common man," and when it inevitably goes sideways, they blame "speculators" or "greedy landlords" or anybody but themselves. It's a convenient narrative, but it doesn't build homes. It doesn't put roofs over heads. It just leaves regular folks out in the cold, or out in the streets, protesting.
The problem, of course, isn't that people don't want affordable housing. Who doesn't? The problem is that the solutions offered by the political class are often counterproductive. They chase headlines with bold new programs instead of getting out of the way and letting people build, letting markets respond to demand. They view the economy as a machine they can fine-tune from a desk in a capital city, rather than a living, breathing, complex system that largely operates best when left alone.
So, when you see those pictures of tens of thousands protesting in Spain, don’t just see "anger." See the consequence of intellectual arrogance. See the outcome of policies driven by ideology over practicality, by top-down decrees over bottom-up solutions. It’s a lesson for us all, really, whether you’re in Madrid or Topeka: When government tries to be everything to everyone, it often ends up being a burden to most. And eventually, people get fed up. It’s the natural order of things.