Its not exactly hard to come up with a counter-point on right-wing policy here using the same, broad logic. Putin's Russia is having similar issues with an unbalanced budget due to a low oil price - would you say that his mistake is leftist causes?

At the heart of both countries current circumstances are _populist_ causes, and it seems to be the combination of populism and oil dependency that's at the heart of Venezuela's current problems.

In short, relying on the price of a commodity being at or above an historically high level to balance your budget is going to lead to large blow-outs in your budget if the price falls drastically. The comparison to Norway is a good one simply because they created a buffer-fund for handling prices swings. Left or right, that seems like sound economic policy.