Vienna, the Spanish School must be removed from the … market
Vienna, the Spanish School must be removed from the … market
Privatize a piece of history? Idea, before bad, without rhyme or reason. Deliver to the market an institution that is culture in itself and that radiates Europe and many parts of the world of itself? Besides all recognized heritage of humanity? Worse can not be imagined.
It will be said: it is the usual, stale word-of-mouth extremism of those who have always stirred in vain by hanging themselves in vain for everything. Therefore, positions to be buried in the last subscale of the most insignificant of the archives.
And yet: what if the question was … a group of horses? And maybe Lipizzan horses? Lipizzaners precisely in the sense of those of the Spanish Riding School, that school, that is, which since the end of the 16th century has been the cornerstone of history and culture placed in the center of Vienna? It is not an allegory and not even a joke. This is exactly how things are, so much so that a newspaper like the ‘Corriere della sera’ (31-10-2021) gives an account of it with a title that if it is not on the front page, we are close to: “The equestrian academy on the verge of bankruptcy. Austria in shock “.
I mean, what happened? What has happened has happened that cannot happen when the “invisible hand of the market” is recognized as having absolute freedom, and therefore the will, to raise and crush with the same indifferent ease.
Twenty years ago, some ‘Chicago Boys’ in Viennese sauce, emulating that Milton Friedman who theorized the special well served to Chile by Salvador Allende, gave birth to the great thought with creative fury: the Habsburgs are finished long ago and the State , as the sole shareholder of the School, has had its day. It’s time to get the old one off me. This is the era of the free market: seizing opportunities where they exist, inventing them where they are not. Optimization, productivity, profits. These are the new watchwords. They apply to everything. So also for our product. The market is already there, just waiting to be caught. Just reach out to take it. What does it mean? Many tourists and the great mass of enthusiasts. Here’s what it means. Show tickets will go away like hotcakes. At home and away.
For a while it’s fine. Then, traitor market, things get stuck: the proceeds begin not to cover expenses. The more time passes, the harder it is to go on: but guess for whom?
In a situation like this one has to face, since the world began, always in the same way: the exploitation of labor intensifies. In this case, that of the horses, which are forced to do one show after another, even several times a day, without recovery times and with many regards to their well-being. To realize this is, he thinks a little, not some animal rights associations, or some particularly attentive horse lovers, but even the Austrian Court of Auditors which, after having registered the deficit state of the financial statements, puts in black and white juxtaposition that “the economic situation has pushed the managers to multiply the shows more and more, exploiting the horses beyond the lawful and in forms that were not suitable for them. All without offering sufficient rest periods “.
We will see how it will end: if we have to say goodbye to a centenary institution and the skilful elegance of those horses, or if we will witness one of the ways in which a modern state can have the capacity and responsibility to regain the uniformity of globalization, in contrast to the trend. , of pieces of its own history.