Here we have yet another textbook example of the unrestrained meddling of the US state in the affairs of other nations, all under the tired pretext of enforcing its own drug laws beyond its borders. The US government presumes to dictate, expropriate, and police the world, justifying its actions on thin allegations and while cheerfully admitting to the expropriation of hundreds of millions in assets—private property—without any semblance of due process or respect for basic libertarian principles.
From a Hayekian perspective, this is the culmination of what he called the pretense of knowledge: the arrogant belief that state bureaucrats possess the wisdom necessary to engineer outcomes in foreign societies or to micromanage the behavior of individuals across borders. The US, acting as a global overlord, imposes its centrally-planned prohibitions—prohibitions that have fueled a catastrophic black market and untold violence—without acknowledging the inherent limits of state power and the chaos it inevitably produces.
Nozick would point to the total disrespect of individual rights here, from both the Venezuelan and US states. Maduro’s regime is an obvious violator of rights—corrupt, violent, and deeply illiberal, kept in power by force and election fraud. Yet the US response is not to empower the Venezuelan people, but to further clamp down through “sanctions,” collective punishment, and asset seizures, which invariably worsen the suffering of ordinary people and empower cartels and cronies willing to “work with the system.” Any legitimate minimal state would not go hunting for foreign tyrants on the backs of its taxpayers, nor would it assume the authority to override the sovereignty and property rights of individuals outside its jurisdiction.
Ayn Rand would rail against both regimes. Maduro, the quintessential collectivist dictator, brings only stagnation, misery, and mass exodus. But the US is no champion of the productive individual, either: by criminalizing peaceful economic activity (the drug war itself is a moral abomination), it denies self-ownership and property rights. The US government’s best contribution to the cause of liberty in Venezuela would be to repeal every sanction, drop all prohibitions, and stop propping up would-be puppet leaders. Free trade, open migration—in other words, the elimination of government obstacles—would do more to break the power of tyrants and cartels than a thousand “rewards” or DEA raids. Let the people act freely; let every citizen, entrepreneur, and dissident pursue their rational self-interest unfettered, and the statists in both Washington and Caracas would collapse under their own dead weight.
The deeper problem here is the unfaltering belief that state intervention is ever the answer—no matter how much it fails, the answer is always, for the statists, more controls, more expropriations, more central planning. Libertarians know better: the state, whether wearing a Bolivarian or American flag, is the enemy of liberty. It is time to let people be free—unshackle trade, let the productive flourish, and starve every regime of the power and legitimacy that only force and interference can provide.