There is only one reason for limiting citizen ownership to Natural Resources. Because it is the most immediate cause of Social Strife in Latin America and the Bishop’s have a duty to promote peace.
Furthermore, Natural Resources (oil and natural gas) etc are God Given gifts to Man everything else is man made and Stewardship/Dominion over these resources is granted to man in Genesis.
If it works for Natural Resources there is nothing stop other applications. The issue here is Access to Capital Credit collaterlized by Assets or protected by credit insurance with which to invest in the Natural Resources hence the need for some form of Corporate Structure like a Trust through which to make the investment. Most citizens do not generate sufficient savings to make investments. There is need for some type of Credit to make this possible. This is how the rich keep getting richer They have access to Credit.
But is the answer to nationalize and government corporatize natural resources? The Russians tried that right after the fall of Communism, and it didn’t work. By why is it necessary? After all, I can buy shares of Peabody Coal or Exxon freely. Lots of people do. I do not know the credit situation in Latin America. I suppose it’s bad. And the availability of credit certainly matters in the acquisition of assets.
But when it comes to nationalizing things, I am skeptical. I am put to mind of Solzhenitsyn’s description of the situation in the “workers’ paradise” of the Soviet Union. He described it as being a place where “capital is dear and labor cheap, unlike the West where it’s the other way around.”
Possibly there is a structural problem with capital formation in places like Venezuela. Certainly I could imagine that repeated cycles of nationalization/privatization would seriously inhibit capital formation. People have to be secure in ownership of property (including debt instruments) before they will invest. Interestingly, some parts of India have started to boom despite policies that severely restrict investment. But the dirty little secret is that the government has waived a lot of the restrictions in certain places and for certain businesses, Bombay (Mumbai) being a notable example. Regardless, due to the prevalence of English law, what you do own there is relatively secure.
Lack of foreign capital is likely another problem. Venezuela is now cut off from most or all foreign capital, and probably will be for a long time, even if Chavez leaves the scene. It is interesting that the American colonies, at the time of the Revolutionary War, had the highest per capita wealth of any nation on earth…including England itself. That was largely due to the availability of land and largely unrestricted ability to enter into business. The explosive industrialization and development of the U.S. later on was financed mostly through foreign investment…mostly from England. To this day, English interests own far more American assets than those of all other foreign nations combined, and it doesn’t seem to have harmed Americans or Brits, either one. Canada is awash with American and British capital, and it doesn’t seem to have caused them to go desperate. Some of these countries (Mexico comes immediately to mind) inhibit their own potential prosperity by seeing foreign investment as “imperialism” and foreign manufactories as “oppression”. Again, I had the pleasure of discussing Indian business with a native of Mumbai. He was flown to the U.S. by a U.S. company for training, then back to Mumbai to work in a computer tech firm. He informed me that the spread of weath in Mumbai affected nearly everybody for a considerable area. The humblest of traders of goods and services could make massively more than before because Indian employees of foreign firms in Mumbai could afford to pay for those goods and services. A case of a rising tide raising all boats.
Some problems might be cultural. I had a friend who, in the Peace Corps, taught engineering in a college in Venezuela. He said it was difficult to recruit students at all because, in Venezuela, everybody wanted a job with “dignidad” (dignity); a social strata thing. A lawyer had “dignidad”, an engineer didn’t. So everybody wanted to go to law school despite an overabundance of lawyers and poor economic prospects outside of government, and few wanted to be engineers despite an acute shortage of engineers and good pay in the then private petrochemical industry. As a consequence, the government ballooned and industry languished.
My brother taught engineering to Middle Eastern students in a special engineering program at Rice University. He said those students had absolutely no interest in really learning engineering, and didn’t. They were well connected, and their desire was to go back home and, being “qualified on paper” have executive jobs, sitting in nice offices doing nothing but ordering underlings around, while real engineers from foreign countries did all the work. They were quite open about it, but certainly had a good time in Houston drinking and whoring around; something they couldn’t really do openly at home.
Sometimes, when it comes to world economic problems, a person is tempted to simply pull his hair out.
