There is consensus on certain things, price controls being the most obvious example. We have 2000 years of empirical evidence on the failures of price controls.
You aren't going to get me to defend Greenspan's monetary policies or the IMF, but they also never represented anything close to a consensus. There are very few genuine consensus issues in economics. Price controls and free trade are the two big ones, and the empirical evidence for those two things is pretty much unassailable.
I never brought up Venezuela, so I don't see the relevance, but you have the temporal relationship between the drop in oil prices and the decline of Venezuela's economy reversed. Venezuela's economy was failing well before oil prices started to drop(inflation was above 50% and rising in 2013), and would still be failing if oil was still $150 a barrel. Also no other oil producing nation has experienced anything remotely similar to what Venezuela has, even the ones with greater exposure to the oil market.
Venezuela is not an economic system anyone should be defending at this point, regardless of the failures of mainstream economic theories.
Rent seeking as a economic behavior has nothing to do with actual rent. Now obviously real estate owners can be rent seekers, for example by lobbying for restrictive zoning ordinances that protect their property values, but is not at all etymologically related to the paying of rents in the traditional sense.
The solution to rent seeking land owners is to stop giving them what they want, not to try to make it up on the back end with rent control.
As for problems with speculation, real estate is quite possibly the worst asset possible for speculation. It is the one sector if the economy that has direct wealth taxation, it has large overhead expenses relative to other forms of investing(maintenance, insurance, etc), and over time real estate under performs the stock market by a significant margin.
Housing costs are not high because of speculation at all, they are high because there is a mismatch of supply and demand, and rent control does not substantially help keep prices low, it just delays the market from finding an equilibrium by disincentivizing real estate investment.. The cities with rent control are the most expensive real estate markets in the nation, so it obviously isn't working. The only real effect rent control can have is to act as an economic transfer from future tenants to current tenants, while reducing total housing stock and quality of housing.
If you are concerned about rising rents pricing people out of certain markets, the solution would be to insure renters against price increase as a social welfare program(which would not be something I would support, but at least it would do something), not to solve it by restricting the proper functioning of the market and distorting the price signals.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w24181?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw
There is also an argument to be made that speculators do provide social and economic utility by increasing the speed at which the market reaches the correct price, but that's a whole other thread, and not really important when talking about the effectiveness of rent control.