Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. According to various media reports, the U.S. is considering launching airstrikes against Venezuela after a series of raids on alleged drug smugglers and hints from the Trump administration that regime change is needed.
Now whatever immediate warrants there are for an attack, the crisis in Venezuela has been growing for decades now. According to a 60 Minutes report last week, and I quote, freedom isn't the only thing in short supply in Venezuela. Hunger, chronic blackout, scarcity of essential medicines all 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, end quote. The reason it was so wealthy is that 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 U.S., which is about 43 billion barrels. In other words, Venezuela should be swimming in wealth as it was not that long ago. Today, it's on the edge of economic collapse.
Now, at least part of the problem is that Venezuela has become a petrostate, a nation with so much profit-making petroleum, they felt little need to diversify their economy and instead became dependent just on oil. Petrostates are highly susceptible to market swings and disruptions in the supply chain. Even more importantly, the governments of petrostates tend to ignore their citizens. In nineteen ninety nine, after time in jail for a failed military coup, Hugo Chavez was elected President of Venezuela. He promised liberation, earned the praise of left leaning people in Hollywood and elsewhere.
But the rhetoric never lined up with the reality. Rather than improve the lot of his people, his policies only made things worse. Like most dictators, Chavez and his cronies lived quite comfortably while the nation struggled. And the situation did not improve under his successor, Nicolas Maduro. As the Colson Center's Roberto Rivera snarked at the time, and I quote, there's one diet you've never heard of that's enabled millions of people to lose at least 20 pounds without any effort on their part, the Maduro diet.
Under the Maduro diet, 75% of Venezuela's 32 million people lost an average of 24 pounds and have probably lost more since. And yet despite the struggling economy of Venezuela at the time, Maduro was elected to a second term in 2018. Just last year, when results pointed to an almost 70% win for his opposition, Maduro simply wrote off the election and then violently cracked down on protesters. In response, many Venezuelans have voted with their feet. According to a CBS story, and I quote, nearly 8 million Venezuelans, roughly 20% of the population, have fled the country in the last decade.
Now materialists will claim that the real problems in the world that governments must solve is all about the allocation of resources. Rich nations and rich people steal and hoard wealth while leaving all the rest in poverty.
Well, if that's the case, why do resource-poor nations like Singapore, Japan and the Netherlands live in luxury while Venezuela lags behind? Why do the citizens of Poland, a nation with a lower per capita GDP than Venezuela just a generation ago, now make an average of thirty five thousand dollars a year compared to just seven thousand dollars per year that Venezuelans make?
Well, there are certainly many problems that all nations must solve. Rarely, however, are the most important ones about resources or the lack thereof. More often, these problems are all about worldview. Specifically, are people thought of as consumers of resources, and is the world of resources considered to be limited? If so, then all resources must be carefully controlled by those in power and then distributed according to some evaluation of need and warrant.
Typically, the calculations become corrupted, and those in power get way more than everyone else does. And when there's not enough to go around, well then the overall need has to be reduced. And that tends to happen either by reducing what others are entitled to consume or by reducing the number of consumers themselves. 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. The resources available to a nation can be grown and expanded, and the most effective thing that government can do is to encourage such growth. Government control, on the other hand, often comes with a pretense of good intentions, but just as often controlling governments fail. usually due to personal ambition. Most dictators claim to fight for justice and prosperity, but instead they turn out both oppressive and incompetent.
Whether American intervention or threats of intervention will make things better for Venezuelans in the long run remains to be seen. What's certain is that Venezuelans deserve better. In fact, all people do, because people are not simply resource consuming animals. We are image bearing, creatives, that have been tasked by God to fill and to farm, to be fruitful, and to multiply. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources to live like a Christian today, go to breakpoint.org. Educators, learn how to manage your finances God's way with Give, Save, Spend, a new online course from Colson Educators Encompass Financial Ministry.
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