Oil today, or fertile agricultural land 150 years ago, doesn't make government big or small. It just frees whoever controls the natural resource from accountabi

Oil today, or fertile agricultural land 150 years ago, doesn't make government big or small. It just frees whoever controls the natural resource from accountability to others and lets them do whatever they want to do. Putin wants to run a superpower, so he pours the oil money into a bigger defense budget than Russia's GDP justifies. Maduro is (notionally) a socialist and pours the oil money into a bloated bureaucracy.