THAT GIANT SUCKING SOUND :

Vapid Venezuela : Which non-Arab country is filled with corrupt, oil-rich layabouts? (TUNKU VARADARAJAN, April 16, 2002, Wall Street Journal)

From top to bottom, Venezuela is a welfare state that lives off oil. Nothing of note is manufactured there. Nothing of note is manmade. The country's riches--oil, vast rivers, rich delta soil, rainforests, a vivid coastline, huge gold deposits, spectacular waterfalls and some of the most beautiful landscape one could hope to see--are all part of nature's bounty. What man--Venezuelan man--has done is to take, take, take.

And what he has built, or done, has been vile. Caracas is the ugliest city in South America. And Venezuela's civitas is the most underdeveloped of any of the major Latin American countries, its intellectual resources virtually nonexistent, its universities numbingly mediocre, its art a ghastly simulacrum of imported trends. Even its soccer team sucks. (The local excuse for the latter is that the national game is beisbol, but that game doesn't rise to great heights there either.)

So we have, here, a society of drones, so used to buying gas at 12 cents a gallon that they will burn buses and loot supermarkets if the price is raised to 13 cents. Petroleos de Venezuela, the national oil company, is state-owned, and its precious liquid irrigates every facet of life. This has left the civic musculature soggy. They to whom things come too easily become chronically work-shy, even congenitally so.

Let us not forget that Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan strongman, was elected by an overwhelming majority. Why? He promised to fight corruption, for one, which in Venezuela means tapping into the resentment that the little guys who rob the system blind have for the big guys who rob the system blinder; but he also promised to safeguard the Venezuelan way of life, by which he meant that no economic reform would come in the way of Venezuelans enjoying the bounty of their land, whatever this might cost future generations. Petro-welfare forever. ÁViva petroleo, viva!

Bernard Lewis, in his book What Went Wrong, makes the point that oil revenues have actually been a curse on the Middle East for one very important reason : the governments of the petro-nations don't need to collect taxes.

What's that?, you say. This is a blessing! Imagine, no taxes...

But, in fact, tax collection has the wonderful effect of focussing a populace's concentration on the actions of its government. When a government asks its citizens to contribute to the state, the leaders end up being held accountable for how they spend the money. Leaders in places like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia do not need to tax their people and therefore don't need to listen to their people. It's little wonder that leaders who are accountable to no one...well, not to put to fine a point on it...suck. .

N.B.--Many of you will object that we are taxed extravagantly and most of us hate how the government spends our money. Sadly, this is not the case. The majority of people have made the accurate if shortsighted determination that they end collecting far more in government services over the course of a lifetime than they ever pay in, so they don't really care if the system is inefficient. As long as the government is going to pay for their retirement and health care when they get old, they figure they're getting a good deal.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 18, 2002 5:42 PM