The outdated zealotry of Kimberly Fiorello
Anyone who receives Representative Kimberly Fiorello’s Capitol Update knows that when faced with how to vote on a proposed bill, Fiorello has one guiding question: Will this bill enhance individual freedom or diminish it?
In Fiorello’s eyes, government is “overarching” and “unaccountable.” Fiorello writes, “I do not believe we need government legislation, i.e. new laws, to do what needs to be done. We, the people, can and ought to just do it.”
She sees government as comprised of unelected bureaucrats akin to parasites feeding on taxpayer dollars. The solution, she believes, is in individual freedoms. “The brilliance of the American system is based on fundamental trust in voluntary transactions among free people to solve problems, find solutions, and meet each other's needs,” Fiorello writes.
This naive Libertarianism, fed by the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, reveres the market as the most optimal decision-maker, not only in the economy, but for all social needs. In this view, each person should be allowed to pursue his or her self-interest without interference or direction from governing elites who think they know what is others’ best interest.
The problem with this dogged faith in individual choice is that it ignores decades of economic research about market failure, which occurs when rational pursuit of individual desires does not lead to rational outcomes for the larger community. For example, with the tragedy of the commons, individual fishermen will catch fish to the point of extinction, leaving all fishermen worse off. Yet there is no incentive for any fisherman to limit his catch because that only leaves more fish for his competitors. Only the regulation of fishing by a government can preserve the long term survival of the fishermens’ livelihood.
Another market failure is the concept of negative externalities,
whereby the prices charged by producers do not reflect the true cost of the damage they cause. Pollution, global climate change, and the plastic pollution crisis are examples of market failure where the industries responsible for these problems have passed on the cost of dealing with them to governments and individuals.
Fiorello’s faith in what she calls “we the people,” is the cornerstone of neoliberal economics. Rational choice theory holds that individuals use rational calculations to make choices aligned with their objectives. Yet we see all the time how people make terrible choices, such as gathering in large groups during COVID or storming the Capital, when they are fed a steady diet of lies and disinformation.
Fiorello’s blind faith in individual choice and her distrust of government explains her extremist voting record. She has voted against every piece of civil rights legislation because she believes that racism lives in people’s hearts and government has no role in mitigating it. Embracing the libertarian goal of replacing public schools with private ones, she introduced a bill to divert public school funding to charter schools. She has been at the forefront of the protest against requiring vaccines for public school students, claiming that individual liberty trumps public health. She has spoken out against every piece of climate legislation introduced in the Assembly, opposes any kind of gun regulation, and voted against a ban on importing trophies from the killing of highly endangered African Big-6 large mammals.
Fiorello’s simplistic libertarian views are hopelessly out of date for dealing with the complex problems our state faces. The challenges of addressing the climate crisis, educating our students for jobs in the information age, modernizing our infrastructure, and combating decades of institutional racism can only be solved by people who believe that government can be a force for good when markets fail.