The Rich Get Richer and The Poor Poorer

Boracay Sunset

BORACAY, PHILIPPIANS: Boracay is a pristine island paradise overrun with tourists from around the world. “It wasn’t like this ten to twenty years ago. You could walk down this beach and hardly see a soul. Now everyone is trying to cash in. There are no limits on the number sailing cruises, diving outfits, bars, restaurants, and hotels,” the man trying to sell me on a sailing cruise told me. “It’s difficult for a small operator like me to make a living. The big operators have ways of capturing the market that we do not.” I think of how my own itinerary was organized by a travel agency owned by Qantas. The agency in turn works with a broker who get volume cut rate deals from hotels, to transfers, to specific activities, whether that be a dive, a cruise, or a dinner show. This should translate into lower prices for the consumer, but I don’t think that’s the case, as each level of coordination takes its cut: Qantas gets theirs, the agency gets theirs, the broker gets theirs, and the owners of the specific activities get theirs. In the end the consumer ends up paying a premium and those working the activities get peanuts. It’s more and more difficult to beat the system as anyone offering services outside the system risks losing the business generated by that system. This in a nutshell is how the rich get richer and the poor poorer. At each level of transaction, far removed from the tuc tuc driver, hotel clerk, or tour guide are the capitalist dealmakers siphoning off the fruits of their labor.