One of my first memories of celebrating New Year’s was in Caracas, Venezuela, on a family visit. That trip is a flicker of scenes, as most early memories are. A packed church, a grove of fruit trees, a busy city with mountains in the background, impossible-looking birds with rainbow feathers.

The Venezuela I perceived was one of abundance, even without knowing I was standing on top of the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Oil production at that time was well over 2.5 million barrels a day, and poverty was falling as the popular president Hugo Chávez distributed profits from the nationalized energy industry to the poor.

That was before the inevitable costs of Chávez’s socialist movement caught up with its spending. As the economy started to slow down over the next decade and deadly lawlessness increased, my cousins sought the safety of an education abroad. Relatives started spending more time outside the country they loved than in it. Many left altogether.

They were, in retrospect, the lucky ones. A large deficit, rampant corruption and plummeting oil production contributed to hyperinflation that sent the economy into a spiral and roughly 8 million Venezuelans into refugee status. A land of abundance was starving.

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Even on top of a seemingly unlimited source of wealth, the socialist regime drove the nation’s economy into the........

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