JUST IN: Venezuela sends another Maduro associate to U.S. custody to face corruption charges.

Hugo Chávez seized more than 1,000 private companies between 2002 and 2012, and every single one produced less under state control than it did before the expropriators walked in. Not most. All of them. Take SIDOR, the steel giant Chávez nationalized in 2008. It shipped 4.3 million tons that year; by 2019 output had collapsed below 200,000 tons. Chávez purged PDVSA of 18,000 skilled workers in 2003 and stuffed it with loyalists; the company, sitting on the largest proven oil reserves on earth, pumped 3.2 million barrels a day in 1998 and under 400,000 by 2020. The state also grabbed Agroisleña, the country's main farm supplier, renamed it Agropatria, and fertilizer promptly vanished from the shelves. Cement, electricity, banking, rice mills: same pattern, every time. Bad luck does not repeat a thousand times. A bureaucrat who faces no profit-and-loss test cannot calculate. Without market prices for capital goods, he cannot know whether the factory he runs creates value or burns it. Central planners lack the information needed to allocate resources efficiently. Venezuela ran that experiment a thousand times over, same result each time. The managers who replaced the owners were not stupid. They responded rationally to their actual incentives: please Caracas, hit political quotas, skim before the next purge. Output was nobody's problem because output was nobody's property. If your government starts seizing companies "for the people," the production those companies generate is already gone. Expropriation transfers assets while destroying the wealth those assets once created, and the people it claims to serve absorb the shortage.