There’s a lot of fuss right now about the price of property. The kind of things being said show how important it is that the life skills lessons in schools be made to include simple economics, how money works, and the basic principles of business. Then maybe we’ll put an end to all this nonsense, and be spared the vacuous opinions – published, broadcast and even spoken in parliament – of people who think that the price of property can be divorced from the myriad factors that fix it.

I’ve written this before but it bears repeating. The price of property – like the price of almost everything else except cheap goods from China – is low when the economy is in recession, stagnant or depressed and people don’t have the money to buy. And even those cheap goods from China are cheap because the Chinese are poor and paid a pittance. The price of property is low when nobody wants it because the area is bad or undesirable. It is low when supply so far outstrips demand that it’s a buyers’ market, with owners desperate to sell and willing to slash prices to do so.

None of these factors apply to the current situation in Malta. I’ve written this before, too, and again it bears repeating: property prices were low in the 1970s and 1980s because people were badly off. There was no money around. Those who had money exported it illegally to keep it safe, and who can blame them? Now it’s all coming back again, and it’s being ploughed into property. That’s part of the reason demand is so buoyant. You can only expect more of the same in the run-up to E-day, when Malta converts to the euro. People with undeclared liquid assets will rush to convert them into capital assets – property – to avoid the controls and monitoring involved in converting their Maltese lira into euro.

That’s only a small part of what’s causing the upward pressure on property prices, though. The main reason is that more and more ordinary people have the money to buy property, and more and more of them are doing so. It’s a seller’s market, and it has been for some years now. As one block of flats after another comes on to the market, the doomsayers often ask: but who is buying them all?

Well, I don’t have their names or numbers, but people are buying them. I know that because most of them are sold. Some people make the mistake of confusing empty flats with flats that are on the market. The fact that a flat is empty does not mean it is for sale. This is as silly as saying that the revision of the rent laws will release 20,000 pieces of property on the market, and deflate prices. Oh, yes? And where will the people who live in those 20,000 houses and flats then live once they are kicked out – on the streets? No – other houses and flats will have to be found for them, a full 20,000.

Many new flats are being bought on plan. The best ones are snapped up so fast that even before they are finished they have already changed hands at least once, with a concomitant price increase. The flats that make the news are the big, sophisticated complexes, where only those with a certain amount of money can afford to live. Yet that which makes the news is inevitably the exception, and not the rule. By far the hottest sellers, as any estate agent or developer will tell you, are small flats with one or two bedrooms. Put a block of these on the market, and they vanish while you’re still writing up the ad for the newspapers.

For the 110th time, it is demand, and only demand, that forces property prices up. To stop prices climbing, you have to curtail demand. To do this, the government would have to ban people outright from buying, or do it the roundabout way, by ensuring that they have so little money that buying property is impossible. The government could also stop the banks giving loans, so that new couples will have to camp in their parents’ sitting-room, or rent a flat because they can’t buy one. And if the government does that, I and thousands of others who had our fill of the Labour government in the 1970s and 1980s will pack our bags and leave Malta. There is only so much one can take in a lifetime. Then the population of Malta will shrink and property prices will go down anyway.

The curious thing is that the people who complain loudest about the high price of property are generally the very same ones who agitate against the building of more and more flats. They don’t see the contradiction inherent in their reasoning: that a clampdown on development will stem supply, but because it won’t also stem demand, prices will be pushed up even higher.

I’m sorry, but I’m not about to sit down and sob at the fate of young couples who can’t afford to buy. Where are these young couples? They’re probably over at the bank as we speak, getting a loan, like the rest of us did. They’re certainly not sleeping on the streets or having their babies in caravans. And perhaps I should tell the churchmen that one of the real reasons so many of them are not getting married is because they’re better off having a baby outside marriage and pretending that the woman is a single mother with no man in her life. That way she gets benefits and maybe even a flat, for free, off the backs of the rest of the population. There are so many couples who pretend they’re single mothers that it’s just unbelievable.

There’s plenty of brand-new property out there in the Lm35,000-Lm40,000 bracket, and between two people who work, this is perfectly affordable – unless you’re on the minimum wage. And for those, there’s social housing and other benefits, which is as it should be – as long as they’re not pretending to be single mothers when the baby’s father is in the equation and bringing in a lot of undeclared income through his work as an electrician. Please don’t tell me that two people can’t afford to buy a flat for Lm35,000 between them. If they can’t, it’s because they’re spending their money elsewhere, on running two cars, for instance.

A few commentators have expressed their dismay because some pieces of property featured in the Sunday advertisements cost upwards of half a million. Oh, I love that: now we have the communist approach to property. If I can’t have a house that costs half a million, then nobody else should be allowed to do so. Failing that, there should be no houses on the market that cost half a million, because I can’t afford one. So the government should do something about it. It should either ensure that I can buy a house worth half a million, by forcing the owner to sell it for Lm20,000, or it should requisition all Lm500,000 houses and give them to the poor and deserving.

Instead of encouraging this kind of thinking, the government and the Church should tell the whining population of Malta: “Look here, if you want to buy a house or a flat, grow up, get real, and work for it.” This everything-cheap-or-for-free mentality has got to go. Even social housing comes at a high price: the high price paid by those in the 35 per cent income tax bracket.

That’s a lesson this nation of free-lunchers has got to learn, and fast. Oh and by the way, when the Church speaks about this subject, it should remind those who are listening that it owns the Apostleship of Prayer Savings Bank – APS for short – which does a great deal of business by way of house loans to young couples.

Now Labour MP Karl Chircop has given us his two-cents-worth. The government should adopt measures to regulate estate agents, he told parliament. Oh really, my dear – indeed? He clearly hasn’t a clue what he is talking about, or else he has too much of the old socialist about him and doesn’t belong in so-called “New Labour”. What does the regulation of estate agents have to do with the price of property?

Maybe Dr Chircop is one of those people who thinks that a price is what the seller says it should be. No, darling – in a liberalised economy it’s the market that fixes prices. The price is whatever people are willing to pay for whatever you’re selling. If there’s somebody out there who wants to pay Lm1 million for your property, then that’s the price. You’d be nuts to sell it for less just to keep Karl Chircop and the Archbishop happy. A seller can only fix the price at the level he wants to when he’s operating in a monopoly situation and people are desperate to buy: colour televisions under the 1980s Labour government, for example, which cost the equivalent of three months’ salary.

Now a clutch of MPs from both sides of the house has called for “the stakeholders” to get together and discuss possible solutions. Curiously, they imagine these stakeholders to be the banks, the estate agents, and – wait for it – MPs. The most important stakeholders – the buyers and sellers, without whom there would be no property business – are left out. That’s an interesting way of looking at things. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before some Labour MP suggests that the government takes control of the property market by requisitioning everything and selling it off for peanuts. The Church would have to get by without the interest it makes from house loans given to all these unhappy young couples whose backs and marriages are being broken by repayments, and we’d all be even worse off than we were under Dom Mintoff.

High property prices are the sign of an economy that’s ticking over. Be thankful for them. It’s if and when property prices begin to dip that you’ll have real reason to be worried. Instead of clapping your hands in glee at the thought of all that lovely cheap property you can buy, you’ll be counting your cents and wondering how soon you can get out of the country to find work elsewhere.

Yes, give people some lessons in economics – that’s what I say.