News and Analysis By Susan Shelley
Last November, Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer spoke out against freedom. Ferrer was on a webinar chatting with two faculty members at UC Santa Cruz, where the chancellor had just honored her with the university’s Alumni Achievement Award. Speaking from her county office in a relaxed interview format, Ferrer shared her thoughts about public health, the COVID pandemic and her goal of transforming society by addressing “the root causes” of inequities. Professor Matt Sparke, from the university’s political science department, asked her about the difficulty presented by “angry men arguing for their own personal liberty.” “I do hear you that there are some people who have seen this as a time to really promote individual liberty and freedom, a sort of sense of entitlement, of being able to make our own rules as individuals, but that is a tiny fraction of the people,” Ferrer said. It’s not so tiny. That fraction includes the other 57 counties in the state plus the rest of the country. And it’s not “a sort of sense of entitlement.” It’s an actual entitlement: “… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments are instituted “to secure these rights,” deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That’s in the Declaration of Independence. The United States stands on a foundation of individual liberty. On what is Barbara Ferrer standing? Thin ice. Ferrer told the Santa Cruz professors that there’s “a human pact that we’ve made with each other.” She cited seat belt laws, laws that prohibit smoking in public places and workplace drug tests as examples of “rules” we all must follow as part of this human pact. At Thursday’s media briefing, Ferrer told Fox 11’s Marla Tellez that there is “sort of a contract that we have with each other that says, ‘these are rules that help us all live together as safely as possible.’” She said this “contract” helps to enforce her unique requirement that anyone (mostly schoolchildren) who has an exposure to a COVID-positive individual must wear a mask indoors for ten consecutive days. In reality, there is no “human pact” and there is no “sort of a contract.” There’s only the March 2020 state of emergency for COVID-19 that is still in effect in California. That’s what allows Ferrer to issue “health officer orders” as she thinks necessary to achieve her goals. Ferrer is an example of what libertarian author Isabel Paterson called “the humanitarian with the guillotine.” Way back in 1943, Paterson wrote that “politicians can get votes out of distress” while “the humanitarians land lucrative white-collar jobs for themselves distributing relief funds.” Ferrer’s government salary and benefits total more than $600,000 per year and she’s very anxious to hand out relief funds. “We need to invest in the infrastructure of community-based organizations, who are the drivers of economic engines in our neighborhoods,” she told the Santa Cruz group. “That’s where we’re going to find the ability to address the challenges of climate change” as well as education gaps and “inequities in economic opportunities.” Ferrer reminisced about her experiences as a community studies major, describing “sort of the collective coming together, the collective acknowledgment of our profound connections to each other.” Collectivism is not new. Most of the world was organized that way throughout history. The founding of the United States formalized a new and different structure that was not based on group responsibility or government redistribution. Isabel Paterson’s 1943 book, “The God of the Machine,” analyzes different structures of government and economic systems as if they were powered mechanisms. Paterson’s chapter on “The Structure of the United States” explains how the framers of the Constitution broke away from “the collectivist theory of the group” as superior to the individual, leading to “the unparalleled expansion of the United States” and “the even more extraordinary extension of the field of physical science and mechanical invention.” In 150 years, there was “a rise in the standard of well-being beyond even the dreams of humanity in the past. Nothing of the sort had ever occurred in the world before; history reveals nothing comparable to the United States as a nation.” This was the blueprint for freedom and prosperity: limited government power and secure individual rights, including the right to private property. Paterson wrote, “What happened was that the dynamo of the energy used in human association was located. It is in the individual … The dynamo is the mind, the creative intelligence.” The Constitution’s provisions freed the mind from political control and secured the right to private property, the “material means” on which intelligence and initiative would operate. So it’s wrong to think freedom and individual liberty are somehow blocking the collective good. There can be no collective good, or anything good, unless individuals are free to create and provide it. Of course, Barbara Ferrer doesn’t think protecting freedom is necessary, or even a good idea. “The heart of what’s important,” she told the Santa Cruz faculty members, is “to build partnerships with the workers.” She said it is necessary “to support the workers that are not unionized with public health councils, worker councils, so they can come together and be part of the effort to create worker safety.” In other words, Ferrer wants to assist unions with organizing efforts under the guise of health and safety requirements. Lots of new rules will lead to lots of violations, all reported by union-trained “councils” inside non-union workplaces. Costly “violations” create negotiating leverage, leading to more gains for unions. That’s the humanitarian’s guillotine for L.A. business owners. “I think that business interests need to somehow step back when we’re in the middle of a pandemic,” Ferrer said. Maybe her plan is to keep L.A. “in the middle of a pandemic” permanently. If enough people are required to wear masks, it will appear to be true. And in Los Angeles, appearances are everything.
### This column originally appeared in the papers of the Southern California News Group. Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley
