Venezuela profits from one overwhelming endowment, which is its crude oil -- more oil than all the rest of South America provides. But the sheer existence of the oil generates in turn a resentment of those who have ownership of it. In Venezuela, over a period of several generations, the government gradually increased its taxation on profits from the sale of the oil, and then finally in the 1970s simply nationalized the oil industry.
Theoretically, this would give the Venezuelan people one less thing to be inflamed about. Except that democracy, provoked, can act outside the bounds of reason. It was an old saw 70 years ago that the impoverished farmer in the Soviet Union next door to the successful farmer worked not to replicate the practices of his neighbor, but to urge the state to confiscate his neighbor's harvest. Venezuela's hatred of the United States generates the equivalent of calls to confiscate the successful harvest.
In certain quarters in Venezuela the hatred of the superpower to the north can be all-consuming. When Hugo Chavez, a demagogue of surrealistic extremes, came along, many saw a racy attractiveness in the totality of his iconoclasm. In 2002, the United States, we have been given to believe, had a hand in an attempt to dethrone Chavez. But it didn't work, and the result of it was a democratic re-election in which Hugo Chavez got a higher percentage of the vote than Abraham Lincoln did when he ran for a second term.
What will happen now?
What always happens when policies are set in flat collision with reality. Venezuelans will become poorer, the political scene will close its door on freedom of the press, and someday down the line, the people will be rescued from the exorbitant lengths to which, acting on democratic license, they took themselves.