I listen to NPR twice a day (don’t ask, I have my reasons) and today I caught this gem that you won’t find easily on NPR’s website but here is a link.

Morning Edition host David Greene was talking to reporter Girish Gupta about the mess in Venezuela right now.  As is noted in the story’s opening, even before the current upheaval, the country was a no good, rotten place to live:

“Venezuela, we should say, has one of the world’s worst rates of violent crime. Inflation is running at 56 percent, and stores are often out of basic staples such as milk and flour.”

And toward the end, here is the best part:

GREENE: You know, you’re describing this economic mess, which makes me want to try and understand why this oil-rich country is in this situation. I mean, why isn’t the oil money in Venezuela actually helping to make people better off?

GUPTA: Well, that is the big question here, and that’s the question the opposition often poses to the government. OPEC says Venezuela has the world’s highest oil reserves, yet they don’t necessarily seem to be making Venezuelans rich themselves. You’ve also got social economic policies, such as currency controls and price controls, essentially devaluing people’s money every single day.

Wow, who would’ve guessed that price and currency controls would wreck an economy?  A country with one of the highest oil reserves is essentially in a state of poverty so we all should be taking note of what brought this crisis in Venezuela.

But that isn’t the most interesting part of that last quote from Gupta.  The quotes above are from the transcript on the NPR website and pay attention to the word I highlighted above as you go back to the link and click the play icon next to “Listen to the story.’  You can listen to all 4+ minutes but if you don’t have time skip ahead to the 2:30 mark for the above exchange between Greene and Gupta.  See if you can catch the mistake in the transcript.

Did you catch that?

The audio said “socialist economic policies” not “social economic policies” and that little error makes a big difference.  Or was it an error?  Is NPR trying to hide the fact that we see another example in Venezuela, like we’ve seen in countless other countries throughout history, where Socialism is horrible for the economy and its people?

And here is a screen shot of the NPR article in case you think I’m altering the NPR text:

Leftists are living in denial about the evils of Socialism and NPR isn’t helping matters by burying this story AND altering the transcript to remove any link of Socialism to Venezuela’s recent woes.