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. On January the 3rd, after months of strikes on Venezuelan boats allegedly carrying drugs into the United States and talks of regime change from the Trump administration, a U.S. military operation captured dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife. They were flown to the U.S., where Maduro faces trial for narco-terrorism and for leading, and I quote, a corrupt, illegitimate government that for decades has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking, end quote.
The common reaction from world leaders was to accuse the U.S. of breaking international law while also being careful not to defend Maduro. A common reaction from Venezuelans around the world, including some of the 8 million who have left that country since 2017, is celebration that this dictator who oversaw the ruin of their country has now been ousted. In October, a 60 Minutes report described the situation in Venezuela this way: quote: Freedom isn't the only thing in short supply. Hunger, chronic black, and the body.
Blackouts, scarcity of essential medicine plagues 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. And it's true, Venezuela should be swimming in wealth. Not that long ago, it was. Venezuela sits on one of the world's largest oil reserves with an estimated 302 billion barrels.
That's 10% more than Saudi Arabia and significantly more than the U.S., which has about 43 billion barrels. But today, the nation sits on the edge of economic collapse.
Now, at least part of the problem is that Venezuela became a petro-state, a nation with so much profit making petroleum, they felt no need to diversify their economy and instead became dependent only on oil. Petrostates are highly susceptible to market swings and disruptions in the supply chain. But more importantly, the governments of petro-states tend to ignore its citizens. In 1999, 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.
His rhetoric, however, never lined up with reality. Rather than improve the lot of the people, his policies made things way worse. Like most dictators, Chavez lived comfortably even as his nation struggled, and the situation only grew worse under his successor, Nicolas Maduro. In 2019, the Coulson Center's Roberto Rivera snarkily described life under Maduro this way, quote, the diet you've never heard of that enabled millions of people to lose at least 20 pounds without any effort on their part, the Maduro diet. He was writing about the fact that in a single year, 2017, 75% of Venezuela's 32 million people People lost an average of 24 pounds.
Yet, despite such widespread hunger and poverty, Maduro was elected to a second term. That was in 2018. And last year, when results pointed to an almost 70% win for his opponents, Maduro rode off the election and violently cracked down on protesters. In response, Venezuelans have voted with their feet. As a CBS story put it, nearly 8 million Venezuelans, about 20% of the population, have fled the country in the last decade.
Now materialists often claim that the real problems in the world that need to be solved are all about the allocation of resources. According to progressives, rich nations and rich people steal and hoard wealth while leaving everyone else in poverty.
However, if it's just as simple as all that, why do some resource-poor nations, like Singapore, Japan, or the Netherlands, live in luxury while Venezuela lags? Why do the citizens of Poland, a nation with lower per capita GDP than Venezuela a generation ago, now make an average of $35,000 a year compared to Venezuelans? who make just $7,000 a year.
Now there's many problems that every nation has to solve. How they define such problems and the solutions is all about worldview. Specifically, are people valuable? Are they merely entities to serve the state? Are human beings mere consumers of resources?
And is the world of resources itself limited? If so, the resources have to be carefully controlled by someone in power and then distributed according to some evaluation of need and warrant and value. And typically, in such calculations, those who are in power get way more than everyone else. And when there's not enough to go around, the overall need has to be reduced. That happens either by reducing what citizens are entitled to or by reducing the number of citizens.
In contrast, successful nations recognize and encourage the most important natural resource of all, human ingenuity. Citizens are thought of as producers and consumers. Through human effort and human ingenuity, the available resources can be grown and expanded. Government's more effective when it encourages such growth. Though government control often comes with the pretense of good intention, most of the time controlling governments fail from personal ambition.
Most dictators claim to fight for justice and prosperity, but they turn out to be oppressive and incompetent. And that certainly describes Maduro. Whether this dramatic American intervention will make things better for Venezuelans in the long run remains to be seen. What's certain is that the Venezuelans deserve better than what they've had. All people do, because people are not merely resource consuming animals.
They're image bearing creatives tasked by God to fill and to form 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 with Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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