NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE V enezuela’s last oil-drilling rig has shut down.

Venezuela still has plenty of oil — about one-fifth of the world’s known petroleum reserves are under the jackbooted feet of Hugo Chávez’s heirs. Nothing happened to the oil, and, in spite of the recent coronavirus-related turbulence in the energy business, nothing really happened to the oil market, either.

Politics happened, and destruction happened. Sometimes, those are synonyms.

What’s a barrel of oil worth? It depends. Economic values are relational. One telephone is worthless — if there were only one telephone in the world, it would be a scarce item, indeed, but not a valuable one, …