When Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, he promised nirvana to a country with 39% of its population living below the poverty line.

Nine years later, as Mr. Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” promotes exotic plans to cut the workday to six hours and offer state pensions to street vendors, homemakers, and maids, the poor are still miserable. To bring about the grandiose proposals, Mr. Chavez’s socialist minions are stripping the goose that laid the golden egg, Venezuela’s formidable oil industry, which accounts for 90% of the country’s exports, as El Presidente doctors the constitution to stay on until 2031.

We have seen such follies before, among other OPEC members: Libya’s mad colonel, Muammar Gadhafi, and the fabulously corrupt princes of Saudi Arabia. Mr. Chavez’s madness is unfolding as the others come down to earth and long after socialism, the object of his affection, became an artifact of history. But this madness is destroying his country’s main asset. In the most dramatic example, the Chavez government has struck at its spectacularly successful refining company, Citgo, the pillar of its refining and sales in the most strategic of Venezuela’s markets, America.

Mr. Chavez’s apparatchiks not only have cut back on exploration and production of oil at home, but also are selling their oil refineries in America, giving up their choice position as the third-largest supplier to the world’s biggest oil market. Refineries are in short supply in America, and the profit margins on oil products are at an all-time high. This is the time to buy refineries, not sell them off.

America will not suffer much, as its oil companies are the ones rushing to buy, with the Marathon Oil Company a big taker.

To muddy the picture further, Venezuela is now trying to sell backed-up oil — which cannot go to its now sold refineries — into faraway markets such as China. This means spending more money to move the stuff on tankers, and getting less for it than the country would have from refining it to gasoline, jet fuel, and heating oil. Venezuela is also selling its interests in pipelines and terminals and has gotten rid of its asphalt business in America, which it sold for $550 million. It’s like an evolved human returning to the cave.

The results, of course, have been catastrophic. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Venezuelan refiner last year shed about 1,800 of its franchised stations and now owns about 8,000, down a whopping 50% from its 1990s peak, when Venezuela purchased Citgo. And there is chaos. According to the Journal, as Citgo’s capacity declined 12% this year, the company found itself in the position of having to “buy” gasoline on the open market to supply some of its gas stations here. Iran is in a similar bind, which goes to show that Mr. Chavez’s best new pal, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, is just as astute a planner.

Stripping your oil industry to produce cash for social services may ensure a lot of votes among Venezuela’s 26 million people for a referendum that would keep Mr. Chavez in power until 2031, as he has hinted, but it is destined to send this Third World economy into a tailspin.

The bottom line in this tale is even after he wrings every penny out of Venezuela’s oil industry, nationalizes every private business, and expropriates all its private wealth, Mr. Chavez cannot possibly raise the kind of capital necessary to anchor his financial lunacy into 2031.

On a visit to Chile some time ago, Mr. Chavez declared, “Capitalist Venezuela is entering its grave” as a socialist one emerges to replace it. It is unfortunate that nothing can stop this jump into an abyss. Carefully groomed “Chavistas” control the country’s National Assembly, Supreme Court, state governments, federal bureaucracy, and all its newly nationalized telephone, electricity, and oil businesses. It is, as one commentator has said, the “tyranny of a majority,” lulled by pipe dreams.

As has happened many a time before, most notably in the ultimate socialist heaven of Russia, these are the kind of dreams from which one often wakes to another revolution.

ymibrahim@gmail.com