Venezuelans are the Victims of Bad Ideas

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According to various media reports, the United States is considering launching air strikes on Venezuela after a series of raids on alleged drug smugglers and hints from the Trump Administration that regime change is needed. Whatever immediate warrants there are for an attack, the crisis in Venezuela has been growing for decades.

According to a 60 Minutes report last week:

Freedom isn’t the only thing in short supply in Venezuela. Hunger, chronic blackouts, and scarcity of essential medicines plague Venezuela. Today, more than 70% of residents live in poverty—a stunning reversal of fortune for a nation that was once one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Venezuela sits on the world’s largest oil reserves, with an estimated 302 billion barrels. As a comparison, that’s 10% more than Saudi Arabia and significantly more than the capacity of the United States, which is 43 billion barrels. In other words, Venezuela should be swimming in wealth as it was not that long ago. Today, it is on the edge of economic collapse.

At least a part of the problem is that Venezuela has become a “petrostate,” a nation with so much profit-making petroleum, they feel no need to diversify their economy and instead become dependent only on oil. Petrostates are highly susceptible to market swings and disruptions in the supply chain.

More importantly, the governments of petrostates tend to ignore their citizens. In 1999, after time in jail for a failed military coup, Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela. He promised liberation and earned the praise of Left-leaning people in Hollywood and elsewhere. The rhetoric, however, did not line up with reality. Rather than improve the lot of the people, his policies made things worse. Like most dictators, Chavez and his cronies lived comfortably while the nation struggled. The situation did not improve under his successor, Nicolas Maduro. As Roberto Rivera snarked at the time:

[T]here’s one diet you’ve never heard of that has enabled millions of people to lose at least twenty pounds without any effort on their part: the Maduro Diet. … Under the Maduro diet, 75 percent of Venezuela’s 32 million people lost an average of [24.2 pounds], and have probably lost more since then.

Despite the struggling economy, Maduro was elected to a second term in 2018. Last year, when results pointed to an almost 70% win for his opponents, Maduro wrote off the election and violently cracked down on protestors. In response, Venezuelans voted with their feet. According to the CBS story, “Nearly 8 million Venezuelans—roughly 20% of the population—have fled the country in the last decade.”

Materialists claim that the real problems in the world are about the allocation of resources. Rich nations and people steal and hoard wealth while leaving the rest in poverty. If this is so, why do resource-poor nations like Singapore, Japan, and the Netherlands live in luxury while Venezuela lags? Why do the citizens of Poland, a nation with a lower per capita GDP than Venezuela a generation ago, now make an average of $35,000 per year compared to Venezuelans, who make just $7,000 per year.

There are many problems that nations must solve. Rarely, however, are the most important problems about resources or the lack thereof. More often, it is about worldview. Specifically, are people considered only to be consumers of resources and the world of resources considered limited? If so, then resources must be carefully controlled by those in power and then distributed according to some evaluation of need and warrant. Typically, according to such calculations, those in power get way more than everyone else. And, when there is not enough to go around, the overall need must be reduced, either by reducing what citizens are entitled to consume or by reducing the number of consumers.

In contrast, successful nations encourage the most important natural resource there is: human ingenuity. Citizens are thought of as producers as much as they are consumers. Through human effort and ingenuity, the available resources can be grown and expanded, and the most effective thing government can do is encourage such growth.

Government control often comes with the pretense of good intentions. Just as often, controlling governments fail due to personal ambition. Most dictators claim to fight for justice and prosperity but instead turn out to be oppressive and incompetent

Whether American intervention or threats of interventions will make things better for Venezuelans remains to be seen. What is certain is that Venezuelans deserve better. All people do, because people are not resource-consuming animals. We are image-bearing creatives tasked by God to fill and to farm, to be fruitful and multiply.

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John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.

BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.