Ex-President Herbert Hoover, writing in one of the popular magazines, attempts to defend what he is pleased to term liberty and to denounce national regimentation.

The article has more psychological interest than economic significance, for it demonstrates, with amazing force, how one may distort the common, every-day meaning of words making a tragic mockery of them so that they become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal, as the good Saint Paul would say.

If I believed in a multiplicity of laws which I most assuredly do not I would say that Hoover should be indicated for misrepresentation of our language, or for libel against sacred tradition or for fraudulent conversion of innocent words, for while the ex-President uses the platitudes of liberty, his brand of "liberty" is no different from the "liberty" that one may expect to find under a national regimentation regime, or the Fascism of Mussolini, or the Statism of Russia.

One of the platitudes of liberty should be memorized, for it is what noble souls have preached throughout the ages. It is as follows:

"It (liberty) is far more than independence of a nation. It is not a catalogue of political "rights." Liberty is a thing of the spirit to be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, and to speak without fear free to challenge wrong and oppression with surety of justice. Liberty conceives that the mind and spirit of men can be free only if the individual is free to choose his own calling, to develop his talents, to win and keep a home sacred from intrusion, to rear children in ordered security. It holds he must be free to earn, to spend, to save, honestly to accumulate property that may give protection to old age and to loved ones."

If one stops to reflect a moment, it will become evident that this kind of liberty has never been put into effect.

(1) To this day, there still remains persecution in one form or another by both religious and anti-religious groups; (2) we are not free to hold opinions, for sedition laws (to mention but one form of restraint) still have teeth in them; (3) men dare not speak on every subject without fear of police, mobs, class prejudice, etc.; (4) men are not always free to challenge wrong and oppression with surety of justice; the reverse is usually true; great wrongs go unrighted while justice is trampled upon; (5) the individual is not free to earn his living; he is lucky if he can get any sort of job.

The above is only the beginning of the indictment, for it would require encyclopedic treatment to cover the whole subject. But the following questions should make it clear that Herbert Hoover has no conception of what liberty really means.

How can any person be free in an "owned" world? When a worker must pay his fellow creature for permission to use the earth, he is almost as much a slave to that owner as if he were actually owned. When the land and natural resources are legally occupied, he is denied the right to work. And those who are fortunate enough to procure employment have most of their earnings taken away from them by landlords (in rent), by employers (in excess profits) and by government (in taxes).

How can there be liberty when the State grants a monopoly of economic rent to landlords? When it grants monopolies to public utilities and other exploiters?

What a mockery Hoover made of the term "liberty!"