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It's insane because they failed to learn what happened to Egypt when they nationalized... or Cuba... or Russia.
Everytime you nationalize you lose ALL of your foreign investers. They fear all of the other industries are next, so they pull out their money.
Cuba... well you can argue international politics on that one, I wont argue.
In the '50s Nasser nationalized the Suez, Agriculture, and Industry. This caused every single Italian, British, French, and Jewish commercial businessman to leave the country. In their absense Egypt has had close to -9% business growth per year. The cotton fields, although better irrigated and more farmland was opened up failed to yield what the smaller and less water fields did before nationalization. Useless industries were started in order to promote "buy Egyptian", they produced exact replicas of Italian and Japanese cars... however were more expensive (even with imports) and were notorious for breaking down constantly. The only stable income Egypt had post-nationalization was from the Suez Canal (they lost it for a while there too) and exporting cheap laborers to other countries (which only lasted about 8 years till the oil collapse)
While under state-controlled oil production, Russia has notoriously poor oil wells and methods of finding it. With the opening to foreign investment they've found 4x the amount of oil the old method thought there was. I wont even talk about how efficient their agriculture was.
Time and time again people look to states to nationalize their systems looking back to Germany in the '30s. However that entire boom was based off of massive military buildup which if not sent off to war would bleed itself dry. Since Bolivia can't exactly invade and conquor a new country every month, this isnt feasable.
Nationalizing resources sounds good, but it's simply not practical. It's inefficient and slow. Back in the '60's they didnt know any better, now they should.
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