Sustainable Tourism Law

TOURISM AND HERITAGE:THE ROLE OF THE WIDESPREAD HOTEL 149 III. SOLIDARITY AS A PREREQUISITE FOR OVERCOMING THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN FREE MARKET AND SOCIAL POLICIES The tourist company, like any other form of enterprise, is a source of wealth and social well-being and, as such, in order to keep up with the logic of the market, must adopt increasingly innovative organizational and management schemes that remain cutting edge. However, the anxiety to achieve maximum profit and maintain a leading position in the market (in the name of a selfish conception of the economy), often leads the company to adopt a reprehensible management behaviour, which inevitably creates catastrophic consequences for other operators. Deprived of any instrument of defence for its interests, the market will be forced to bow to the economic manoeuvres of strong companies, definitively compromising the freedom of competition. If there is no free and fair competition, there is (not only) no form of market and (above all) any form of economic and social solidarity, with the consequent impairment of the social state and the establishment of a stronger totalitarian regime for the enterprise. Facing such a catastrophic scenario, we must avoid the very serious repercussions deriving from bad entrepreneurial management and, to overcome these problems, a radical change of the control system for companies is necessary and should be unflinching, in order to make the ethical values of our ordering into a keystone for the generation of profit and overcome, once and for all, the dichotomy between market logic – ethical values, between market and person. Only in this way can the thesis be affirmed, according to which it is possible to define solidarity as the keystone for building a society free from the burden of incompatibility between the market and social policies, and in which the contractor is willing to pay a higher price than the one set out by the market, but considers the social and environmental cost-benefit relationship of the marketed product. Traditionally, the most recurrent argument for obstructing the achievement of the aforementioned objective was linked to the principle of market economy and the protection of the most disadvantaged. “The market economy 28 - it is said – is the exact opposite of solidarity. “Competition is a war that emigrates the defeated”. Assertions that are, however, devoid of any factual findings. An economy based on the principle of competition can, in fact, be configured as one of the main tools of social justice, capable of producing solidarity in two different ways. On 28 Dario Antiseri “ Solidarietà Cristiana e libero Mercato” newspaper article.