Julio Borges published an article yesterday in Analitica titled Eating the Oil, where he speaks about the need to put the oil to work for us, before its main utility is gone and, figuratively, we end up having to eat it up because we cannot find any use for it.

Borges explains that Venezuela should be taking advantage of the current worldwide energy crisis in order to produce and export more oil and use the profits to develop the internal economy:

There is where Venezuela must see the opportunity. Developed countries are not passively waiting while the oil is running out. For Venezuela it would be an advantage to produce more oil, generating more Venezuelan industries and jobs and looking for a more stable price of oil, instead of waiting for a worldwide depression due to high oil prices.

There's no logical explanation for our extremely low oil production. We are losing a great opportunity, which will lead us to eat the oil instead of sowing it.

Unfortunately, Julio Borges, misses the opportunity to propose and promote the correct measures, and prefers to dwell in generalities in terms of eating or sowing the oil. In my opinion he would could have said instead , easily and at great profit for him, to eat the oil or to privatize PDVSA. The fact that Borges doesn't even vaguely propose how is it that we should generate more Venezuelan industries and jobs makes him suspect of wanting to resort to the old and worn out "Development Plans", which invariably imply a growth of the power and scope of state action at the expense of shrinking the freedom to act of the individuals.

And that's the reason why the politicians on the socialist opposition don't seem to take off definitely: because they don't offer solutions radically different to those proposed by the neocommunist government party (PUSV). Deep inside the socialist opposition agrees on the fundamental tenets of public policy with their chavecistas (followers of Hugo Chávez) adversaries. And that's the reason why it is so difficult for the voters to abandon once and for all the messianic promises of the Socialism of the XXI century, which Chávez promotes. After all, the others (the socialist opposition) don't offer anything essentially different and at least Chávez speaks like one of us.

What we need is a new radicalism in the defense and advocacy of free market capitalism. We have to say firmly: Let's privatize PDVSA and let's transfer the wealth, which nowadays belogns to the state to the people who would better know what to do with it: individuals acting in the pursuit of their own self-interest. In short, let's privatize PDVSA or we will have to eat the oil 20 years from now, when the rest of the world will have evolved into economies fueled by other sources of energy.