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Maduro in a New York City jail cell makes for a clean headline, but we can’t rebuild a country with headlines. We zoom out from the drama and ask the harder question: what comes next for Venezuela when the man is gone but the machine remains? I’m David Kaiser, and this Mojo Minute connects today’s crisis to a book that saw these problems coming decades ago: Hernando de Soto’s “The Mystery of Capital.”

We walk through why political change alone doesn’t repair an economy after years of seizures, corruption, and fear. Venezuela’s collapse isn’t just about oil production or election results. It’s about the invisible infrastructure that makes an economy work: enforceable property rights, trustworthy courts, and a system that lets everyday people use what they own to build wealth. De Soto calls the trapped value in informal assets “dead capital,” and it explains why millions of hardworking people can own homes or businesses yet still be locked out of credit, investment, and growth.

Then we lay out a practical roadmap for recovery: formalize property at scale so assets can become collateral, build rule of law that can’t be bought, and slash the red tape that keeps entrepreneurs stuck in the shadows. The ending is a challenge, not a slogan: does Venezuela have the political will to do the unglamorous work that turns dignity into durable prosperity?

Key Points from the Episode:

• Maduro’s removal not restoring what decades of socialist demolition destroyed
• GDP collapse and mass flight as signs of systemic rot
• De Soto’s claim that property rights drive wealth creation
• Dead capital as untitled assets frozen outside the formal economy
• Turning dead capital into live capital through mass property formalization
• Building a rule of law that cannot be bought
• Demolishing red tape that blocks small businesses from going legal
• Political will as the deciding factor for Venezuela’s recovery

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