I thought this paragraph was the most enlightening:<p><i>Chávez was an innovator in how he spent money, but he did little to improve how Venezuela actually makes money. He paid no attention to diversifying the economy or investing in domestic production outside of the oil sector. The country relies on imports for many of its most basic goods and services, include food and medicine.</i><p>You could probably put the greatest economic minds in the world in charge of a big country like Venezuela and they would still fail to diversify the economy.<p>Markets are necessary for successful diversification - avoiding shortages and economic collapses when key industries suffer downturns.<p>I'd say social democracies in Europe have shown pretty conclusively that the way to fund broad social programs to help the poor and middle class is via taxation of market economies. Let a healthy private sector self-organize the production of the economy, and let taxes pay for social programs.
Venezuela is simply suffering one of the worst cases of Dutch Disease in the world. The oil prices don't keep up with the spending. With a destroyed economy there is more opportunity for a dramatic system change.<p>This happened before in Venezuela in the 80s/90s and eventually led to Chavéz getting into power.
Venezuela failed because of the lack of a free market. Almost all economic activity was by the government, there were price controls on everything. It turns out the market is much more efficient in managing resources than any one organisation.<p>IOW, in case it's not clear, Venezuela failed because of socialism. It's hilarious to see all these long winded explanations that refuse to name the well known philosophy that has repeatedly led countries to the same place. There is no analysis needed. It has been analysed a hundred times already in history.<p>Suppose I fell off from a hundred story building and died. Now imagine newspaper articles going into gravitational theory and saying that the cause of death was a high speed impact with the ground, which was worsened because it was concrete. That would be stupid. The well known fact is that I died because I fell from a high place. You don't need an analysis for that. It's obvious. Once a phenomenon has been explained and analysed well enough, it can just be named and you need not go into a lot of details and develop your own theory. You can just reuse the name and everybody understands.
Taking the long view, the US and its interventionism is to blame for a lot.<p><a href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10112" rel="nofollow">https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10112</a><p>ps. Here is decent doc by John Pilger synopsising the US's history of interventionism. (Starts at about 38 mins, before that is some stuff from Venezeula from 2007)<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/16724719" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/16724719</a>