Morey STRAUS

The Cascade

This is not a campaign that promises to manage the government more efficiently. It is built on the premise that what the Oregon state government does is illegitimate, counterproductive, or both, a position supported by decades of evidence, billions of misspent dollars, and the exposed track record of the people currently in charge.

The positions here follow from first principles: you own yourself and the fruits of your labor, voluntary exchange beats political allocation, and the power of government is a danger to everyone it claims to serve — especially those it most loudly claims to protect.

Portland’s signature crises — homelessness, drug addiction, property crime, mental illness, unaffordable housing — are treated as separate problems requiring separate agencies and separate budgets. This platform does not propose better agencies. Compulsion is not a management problem that competent administration solves; it is what a state is. Reform leaves it intact on purpose. The five below are not stages in a sequence. They are five places to watch the same thing operate.

Each section below takes one of them. Before funding another rescue, ask what the people being rescued are forbidden to do for themselves.

Housing & Homelessness

Position: Let people build. Every minimum lot size, height cap, and design review is a law that made housing scarcer on purpose; repeal them.

Portland has a severe housing shortage. The standard political diagnosis, that the market has failed, gets the causality backwards. The market has been prevented from functioning. Oregon’s statewide land use planning system (ORS Chapter 197), urban growth boundaries, and local zoning codes collectively function as a cartel protecting existing property owners from competition. Every minimum lot size, maximum height limit, setback requirement, and conditional use process raises the cost of adding housing.

Positions:

• Repeal Oregon’s statewide land use planning statutes. The Urban Growth Boundary is an anti-competitive moat that restricts the land available for development and insulates existing property owners from competition. Portland solved sprawl the way a tourniquet solves circulation.
• Eliminate zoning restrictions on density, use, and building height at the state level, and preempt local governments from reimposing them.
• End all state-mandated permitting delays and design review requirements that add months and tens of thousands of dollars to housing construction.

• Repeal rent control statutes. Rent control destroys supply and benefits current tenants at the expense of everyone else seeking housing. The economic evidence on this is overwhelming and one-sided.

  Read more: Rent Control’s Winners and Losers — Stanford GSB

• End state and local government ownership of housing. Government housing allocates units politically rather than by need and insulates itself from quality competition.

No one publishes a single total for what Oregon has spent on housing and homelessness. The pieces that are public: Oregon Housing and Community Services has booked record budgets biennium after biennium. 2021–23 was the fourth consecutive largest-in-agency-history, and the Legislative Fiscal Office says the same of 2023–25, when the Legislature added $1.14 billion in the 2023 session and $212 million more in 2024.³ The state has routed $1.4 billion to low-income housing developers over the last five years, with $850 million more lined up.⁴ What those projects actually cost is exempt from the public records law, an exemption on the books since 1997, matched, an economist who obtained the same data from seventeen other states found, by exactly one. ProPublica was charged $130 to have the records collected and redacted. Even the black ink comes with a bill.

Over the two years to January 2025, Oregon added more than 3,000 shelter beds, a 39 percent expansion, and the count still reached 27,119 people. The number deserves skepticism in both directions: it rises when a county improves its data collection, and it rises when shelter beds are added, because people in shelters are counted.¹ Neither is the same thing as fewer people without homes.

The visible homelessness crisis in Portland is inseparable from drug addiction and mental illness. Government has not produced effective treatment for either at scale, and its “services” often function as an incentive structure that keeps people in crisis rather than helping them exit it. Voluntary private charity, mutual aid, and faith-based recovery operate at lower cost and without the perverse incentives that plague government-funded programs.

The reason the crisis is so visible is government ownership. The sidewalk in front of your business belongs to the city, but Portland assigns you its maintenance, its repair, and the liability when someone trips on it. What it does not assign you is any say over who occupies it. You pay for the concrete and answer for the injuries; the city keeps the decisions. Private ownership puts the bill and the authority in the same hands. Portland has taken care to separate them.

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Drug Policy

Position: Legalize the supply. Decriminalizing possession while criminalizing the market is not a policy — it is a subsidy for cartels.

What a person puts into their own body is their business, not the government’s. The drug war has been one of the most destructive government programs in modern history: it militarized police, filled prisons disproportionately with poor and minority defendants, created the cartels, and did not meaningfully reduce addiction rates. It did, however, reliably expand the government’s power and budget, which tells you everything about why it persists.

Oregon ran the country’s most ambitious drug policy experiment in 2020. Measure 110 decriminalized possession of small amounts of every controlled substance while leaving the supply chain fully criminal. Users faced only nominal consequences for possession but still got their product from cartels, at cartel prices, of cartel quality. In 2024 the legislature partially re-criminalized possession and declared the experiment a failure. The lesson Salem drew was that decriminalization doesn’t work. The actual lesson was that half-measures fail, and that their failure is reliably used to justify re-expanding state power. The cartels were untouched throughout. They always are, until legalization takes away their monopoly.

The replacement’s returns are in. Multnomah County’s deflection program completed 24 percent of the people referred to it; most, in Willamette Week’s summary, “just ended up back on the streets.” The county redesigned it and now reports 43 percent, a rate covering nine people. In the first three months of 2026 it took 78 referrals, fewer than one a day at a building that runs around the clock.⁵ Salem changed the penalty. It left the supply to the outlaws.

Drug treatment should be private and voluntary. Forced treatment has a poor track record and violates bodily autonomy. Effective treatment exists in the market. Government should stop crowding it out and stop caging the people who need it.

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The State as Vice Merchant

Position: Get the state out of the liquor business. A government that sells you whiskey, sets its price, and skims its own shelves has no claim to be regulating vice.

Oregon sorts intoxicants into three tiers: drugs it prohibits, drugs it licenses and taxes, and one it sells itself. The OLCC (the same agency that licenses cannabis) controls the purchase, distribution, and pricing of every distilled spirit sold in Oregon, a Prohibition-era arrangement that persists because it generates revenue, not because anyone has explained why whiskey requires a state monopoly when beer and wine somehow do not.

In 2023, the agency’s executive director and senior staff were caught diverting rare bourbon, including Pappy Van Winkle, from state inventory for their personal use, a practice investigators found reached back more than three decades. Director Steve Marks resigned, then negotiated a $500 ethics settlement; the commission rejected it 7–1 as too lenient and the penalty was tripled to $1,500.⁶ The institution that decides which intoxicants Oregonians may buy, and at what price, had been skimming its own shelves for thirty years. The fine would not have bought one of the five bottles of 23-year Pappy the state put in its 2022 lottery.

The monopoly is defended candidly, at least. In 2025 this district’s own incumbent carried a bill to let grocery stores sell canned cocktails, written at the grocers’ request and offered with a tax of $8 a gallon — more than twice California’s — earmarked for addiction treatment. It died. That November the commission voted to oppose privatization outright, having worked out that the current arrangement raised $11.4 million on those products between 2020 and 2025 and that private sale would have raised $7.7 million, a shortfall the agency itemized against parks, schools, public safety, and addiction treatment. Its chair gave the reason without embarrassment: “This proposal makes a false promise of new funding based on flawed economics. There is no new money.”⁷ The 2026 successor bill died too. A monopoly that kills its own sponsor’s concession twice and publishes the arithmetic has stopped bothering with a defense.

The bottle bill is an OLCC program too. Oregon imposed the deposit in 1971 at five cents a container and raised it to a dime in 2017, an interest-free loan from every shopper, refundable upon performing a chore. The deposits you never claw back don’t return to you: unclaimed refunds are kept by the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, the private distributor co-op that runs the system. The state invented a bearer instrument — fixed denomination, universally redeemable, no identification required — and then expressed surprise at the economy that grew up around it. The legislature’s 2025 response was characteristic: not to end the program, but to decide where the redeeming would happen. Around each new redemption center, SB 992 lets the large stores that help fund it refuse containers outright, and lets the corner stores cut any one person off at twenty-four cans a day.⁸

Twenty-four cans is two dollars and forty cents. The dime means nothing to the legislator who voted for the cap and everything to the person whose income is the dimes. Contempt for the poor, administered in ten-cent increments.

Positions:

• Abolish the OLCC’s liquor monopoly. Privatize distribution and retail; let spirits be sold like beer, wine, and groceries — by businesses that can be fired by their customers.
• Repeal the bottle bill. Scrap aluminum has market value without legislation; where it doesn’t, no statute makes recycling anything but theater. Oregonians can be trusted to dispose of a can without posting a bond first.

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Health Care

Position: Get the state out of medicine. Oregon has made every alternative to insurance harder to buy than insurance, then pointed at the result and called it a market failure.

Almost nobody in America buys medical care. They buy insurance, and most do not buy that either, because their employer does. Congress froze wages in 1942 and wrote an exemption into the freeze for insurance benefits, then made the arrangement permanent in 1954 by excluding employer-paid premiums from the worker’s taxable income.⁹ Employers competed with health coverage because they were forbidden to compete with money. Eighty years later that is still why your coverage belongs to your job, and why anyone buying a policy alone pays with money the government has already taxed.

No state legislator repeals a federal tax exclusion. What a state legislator can do is stop Oregon from making the alternatives worse, and Oregon has been diligent about making them worse.

Direct primary care is medicine without an insurer: a monthly fee, unlimited visits, no claim forms, no billing department. Oregon was the third state in the country to legislate on it, in 2011, and produced one of the least favorable frameworks in the nation. The statute never says plainly that direct primary care is not insurance. It requires separate registration, and it leaves the Division of Financial Regulation authority to investigate and to write rules.¹⁰ Oregon legalized paying your doctor and then licensed it as a financial product.

Health care sharing is the other way out: members pay one another’s bills from a common fund, with no insurer and no premium. Roughly thirty states have written a safe harbor into their insurance codes. Oregon has not, so these arrangements operate under a regulator free to decide at any time that they are insurance, and a 2025 bill proposed tightening further.¹¹ The people using them are largely the people the regulated market priced out.

Certificate of need finishes the job. Oregon maintains more than forty separate requirements. A company applied in 2018 to build a rehabilitation hospital for stroke and head-injury patients, waited four years for the state’s permission, received it in 2022, was sued by its competitors, and abandoned the project in July 2023.¹² The state said yes. The hospital was never built. Oregon has the second-fewest rehabilitation beds per capita in the country.

The standard diagnosis of the visible mental health crisis is that deinstitutionalization went too far. That gets the history half right. Oregon did reduce institutional capacity through the late 20th century, and at the same time made it illegal or prohibitively expensive for churches, voluntary associations, and private operators to replace what was lost. Thirty percent of Oregon adults have a mental illness, against 23 percent nationally, the highest rate of any state.¹³ That number counts how many Oregonians are ill. It does not measure whether the agencies spending their money are any good at helping them, and the objection here does not depend on the answer.

The 2026 budget cycle made the arrangement visible. Facing a $260 million shortfall, the Oregon Health Authority proposed cutting more than $200 million from the funds paying primary care providers who serve low-income Oregonians, while asking for 27 more positions on top of the 5,997 it already had.¹⁴ The committee accepted the report as information and approved nothing. The objection is not that the state spent too little. The objection is that a monopoly without prices cannot budget. It overcommits, discovers the arithmetic late, and corrects at the expense of whichever dependent has the least political pull. Markets ration by price, continuously. Bureaus ration by committee, after the fact.

Positions:

• End state provision and compulsory financing of medical care, including the mental health bureaucracy and the state hospitals. The Oregon Health Plan spends money taken from people who did not consent, and no improvement in its administration answers that. A state legislator does not repeal Medicaid; the votes that exist are on the state share, the waiver, and the rules deciding who may practice. Oregon’s apparatus does not fail despite its funding. It fails commensurate with it.
• Declare in statute that direct primary care and health care sharing are not insurance, and remove both from the Division of Financial Regulation’s authority. A monthly fee paid to a doctor is a purchase, not a policy.
• Repeal Oregon’s certificate-of-need laws. No one should need a rival’s acquiescence to open a clinic, and no state process should let incumbents litigate a competitor out of existence after it has already won.
• Remove state barriers to private provision. Oregon’s licensing and scope-of-practice rules restrict who may provide counseling, prescribe medication, or operate recovery facilities. These rules protect incumbent providers, not patients.
• Oppose involuntary commitment based on a diagnosis or a prediction of future conduct. That is preventive detention. A credible imminent threat is aggression and may be answered as such, on the grounds that apply to anyone. What nobody should hold is a standing power the passerby lacks: indefinite, triggered by diagnosis rather than danger, reviewed by the institution that exercises it.
• Legalization of currently prohibited substances (see Drug Policy) is itself a mental health intervention. Some share of people labeled mentally ill are self-medicating with criminalized substances, and prohibition adds arrest and punishment to their difficulties.
• Mutual aid, peer support, and private recovery should be free to operate and to compete. The barrier is rarely an outright ban. It is that state money reaches only providers who adopt the state’s credentials, so anyone outside the system competes against a subsidized rival funded partly by their own taxes. Stop paying the incumbents and the alternatives will not need protecting.

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Public Safety

Position: Restitution over punishment, accountability over immunity. Justice should answer to the victim, not to the institution that sends the taxpayer the bill.

Portland’s public safety situation deteriorated after 2020 because the city abandoned enforcement while keeping the same broken monopoly. The political debate has since moved to shuffling funds from the police bureau to Portland Street Response. Neither approach questions the monopoly itself.

Policing is a government monopoly with no competitive pressure to perform. When that monopoly refuses to enforce basic laws, people and businesses should be free to organize their own protection.

The “defund the police” movement of 2020 briefly approached a libertarian impulse and then veered away from it. Its failure was not radicalism but incompleteness: it tried to redirect funds from one government program to other government programs, rather than return them to the people who had been forced to fund failure in the first place. The alternative to a government monopoly on force is not a different government monopoly with a kinder name.

Positions:

• Remove legal barriers to voluntarily funded protection services and private arbitration of disputes. Government does not need to authorize these arrangements; it needs to stop claiming a monopoly on the functions they perform. A business district financed by compulsory assessment is not a private alternative. It is the same tax with a nicer letterhead.
• Government should not be able to take your property without a criminal conviction. Civil asset forfeiture (seizing property without a conviction) is theft by the government, not law enforcement.
• Oregon has taken small steps on police accountability (a state-law cause of action for misconduct was created in 2021¹⁵) but never reformed qualified immunity itself. The unfinished work: abolish qualified immunity as a defense in state court, remove procedural barriers to suing officials personally, and end taxpayer indemnification of judgments against officers. An officer whose employer covers every judgment has no accountability — only insurance.
• The carceral system should be dismantled, not expanded. Incarceration is enormously expensive, corrupts those subjected to it, and serves the government’s interests far more reliably than it serves victims’. Government has managed to build a system where the victim gets nothing, the taxpayer gets the bill, and the institution that failed to prevent the crime gets a bigger budget.
• Restitution to the victim should organize the justice system, including a multiplier of the damage claim set by an arbitrator. Purely punitive measures beyond that serve the institution, not the person it injured. Violent offenders may still require restraint or eviction after payment; paying the award does not purchase a right to remain or to resume. Restorative justice traditions share the intuition that the victim has been forgotten. They do not share the account of why: that the state made itself the injured party and left the actual one to watch. Private arbitration and contractual enforcement are how most human conflict was resolved before government monopolized the function and renamed it “justice.”

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Firearms

Position: No permission slip for a right. Every firearm restriction Oregon has on the table works the same way: the state defines who qualifies, then widens the definition.

Oregon has seen a sustained push to restrict firearm ownership, most prominently Measure 114, a 2022 ballot initiative requiring a permit to purchase any firearm and banning magazines over ten rounds. It has never taken effect. The Court of Appeals upheld it in March 2025, the Oregon Supreme Court heard argument that November and has not ruled, and in the 2026 session the legislature pushed implementation to January 2028.¹⁶ More than five years will separate the vote from the earliest date the measure could bind anyone, and the court may yet strike it. Oregonians still do not know whether it is law.

Self-defense is a natural right. It exists whether a constitution recognizes it or not. The Second Amendment codifies that right but does not create it. A legislature that does not trust its constituents to own firearms has told you something important about its view of the relationship between citizen and government.

It is worth being direct about who bears the cost of disarmament. Minority communities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and others who have historically had the most reason to distrust state protection are also those who most need the ability to defend themselves. The police do not have a legal obligation to protect any individual; the Supreme Court has confirmed this repeatedly.¹⁷ And many of the same voices that argue police are systemically violent, unaccountable, and not to be trusted simultaneously argue that only police should be armed. If that critique of law enforcement is correct, then it is an argument for an armed citizenry, not against one.

Positions:

• Oppose Measure 114 and all permit-to-purchase schemes. Self-defense is not a privilege the state grants upon application — it is a natural right that precedes the state. Requiring prior approval to exercise it treats the citizen as a subject.

  Read more: Exposed Permit Data Shows Discretionary Systems Exclude Minorities and Women — Crime Prevention Research Center

• Oppose magazine capacity restrictions. They burden law-abiding owners without meaningfully affecting criminal use, and they establish the precedent that the government may define what a legal arm looks like.
• Oppose red flag laws as currently structured in Oregon. Confiscating firearms based on a unilateral ex parte order — without criminal charge, trial, or conviction — is a due process violation. The burden of proof must rest on the government, not on the gun owner to petition for their own property back.
• Oppose state-mandated background checks and government purchase records. A private seller is free to check a buyer out; the state is not free to condition a right on its own approval, or to keep the roster afterward.
• Support repeal of restrictions on carrying firearms. The right to bear arms is not limited to the home. Oregonians who lawfully own firearms should be able to carry them without government permission.
• Oppose firearms restrictions at every level of government: state, county, and municipal. A patchwork of local ordinances creates traps for law-abiding owners. The solution is fewer restrictions, not centralized permission from Salem.

A state background check searches someone suspected of nothing, in advance, as the price of a right. Nobody is screened by the government before they publish or worship, and not because speech is harmless.

Then look at who fails. The state does not write the categories; it borrows them from the medical profession and attaches permanent legal consequences, mental-health adjudication chief among them. The American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a disorder until 1973, with a residual diagnosis surviving to 1987.¹⁸ Within living memory, the profession now consulted on who is too unwell to own a rifle was diagnosing the people with the most reason to want one. A profession corrects itself in the next edition. A person stripped of a right waits rather longer. And the state would like to keep a record.

Private sellers, ranges, and insurers may refuse anyone they please, and should. The question was never whether dangerous people can be screened out. It is who keeps the list.

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Personal Autonomy

Position: The state is not a party to your risk. Once “society bears the cost” licenses the helmet law, nothing with a medical bill attached is out of reach.

Oregon requires helmets for motorcyclists of every age and for bicyclists under 16.¹⁹ The risk from riding without one falls on the rider. It is not a public safety law in the sense that word is used elsewhere on this page: no one else’s person or property is endangered by an uncovered head. It is a law that fines you for your own risk assessment.

The paternalist case is always the same one: society bears the cost of your injury, so society gets a vote on your choices. That argument has no stopping point. It justifies banning motorcycles outright, or skiing, or smoking, or a diet the state doesn’t like. Anything with a healthcare cost falls under it. The honest fix for the externality, if the state insists one exists, is to let insurers price the risk, not to conscript the legislature into managing everyone’s skull.

Positions:

• Repeal Oregon’s mandatory motorcycle helmet law for adults. Adults may weigh risk to themselves without a permission slip from Salem.
• Oppose extending helmet, seatbelt-style, or similar self-risk mandates into new categories of activity. If the justification is “it might cost the system money,” the state has justified regulating everything.
• Leave minors’ safety equipment to parents, not statute, the same principle already applied to countless other child-rearing decisions the state does not micromanage.

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Education

Position: Exit, not reform. Compulsory attendance, provider licensing, and vouchers alike keep the state’s hand on the curriculum; only leaving costs it anything.

Oregon’s government schools produce mediocre outcomes at high cost. Portland’s district in particular has struggled with poor reading and math proficiency, high administrative overhead, and a governance structure that answers to the teachers’ union first and to families when it gets around to it.

The deeper problem is structural: government education is a tax-funded monopoly delivered without meaningful competition. The surprise is not that it performs poorly. The surprise is that the people who run it still expect to be believed.

And it is worth remembering what the monopoly was built to do. The American government school system was constructed in the mid-19th century by reformers who stated their goals openly: cultural assimilation of Catholic immigrants, labor discipline for the emerging industrial economy, and the erasure of languages and customs the reformers considered unsuitable for American life. The content has changed. The instrument has not. A system built to manufacture uniformity still manufactures it, and every election decides only which uniformity.

The families with the least still get the worst of it: assigned schools, no exit, and a union negotiating against them with their own taxes. The people progressives speak for are the ones this monopoly eats first.

Positions:

• Support full educational freedom: repeal compulsory attendance laws and allow families to choose any educational arrangement — homeschooling, private school, microschools, apprenticeships — without government interference or required reporting. These are not theoretical alternatives; they exist, they work, and they expand rapidly wherever government does not suppress them.

• Remove state barriers to new educational providers. Accreditation mandates and facility regulations function as incumbent-protection devices, not quality controls.

  Read more: Education: Free and Compulsory — Murray N. Rothbard, Mises Institute

• Oppose voucher programs. Vouchers do not liberate education; they extend the government’s franchise into private institutions. Any private school accepting government money will be subjected to government curriculum, hiring, and admissions standards. This is the ordinary pattern, not a worst case. The goal is separation of school and state, not a new funding pipeline with strings attached.

Libertarians have good-faith disagreements on vouchers. The concern here is simple: money arrives with conditions, and the conditions arrive later than the money. Hospitals took Medicare and got Medicare’s rules. Universities took federal aid and got federal compliance offices. A school that takes the voucher will be told what to teach, whom to hire, and whom to admit, though not in the enabling statute, but in the third rewrite of the administrative rules.

• The position is the elimination of government-funded education. We do not run government grocery stores. Every argument for treating education differently — dependency, access, the public benefit — begins by assuming the thing actually in dispute: that a child’s upbringing is a public matter, and that someone other than the parent has standing to direct it. Concede that premise and the funding question answers itself; the public pays for what the public owns. Refuse it and there is nothing left to fund. Rothbard’s point holds: education is what a person does from birth, mostly outside any classroom, and the state entered it by compulsory attendance law, not by demonstrating it was any good at it.
• Repeal occupational licensing requirements for teachers. There is no credible evidence that licensure improves student outcomes. It restricts entry, raises costs, and protects incumbents.
• Oppose centralized curriculum mandates and standardized testing regimes that homogenize instruction and remove teacher and family autonomy.

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Removing Barriers to Work

Position: Let people prove themselves without asking first. A credential that informs a customer does the same work as a license that bans the competition, without banning anyone.

Oregon restricts entry into the labor market from both ends: it dictates who may work through occupational licensing, and what they may be paid through the minimum wage. Both harm the people they claim to protect. This is not a side effect. It is the mechanism. The people the law is named after are the people the law hurts.

Positions:

• Repeal occupational licensing statutes systematically. The presumption should be against licensure; the burden of proof rests entirely on those who want to prohibit competition. Oregon has the heaviest occupational licensing burden in the United States, ranked first of fifty-one, where first is worst.²⁰ Almost one in five Oregon workers must hold a license before they may legally do the job. What the research reliably finds is higher pay for the licensed. What it struggles to find is better outcomes for the customer. Sanding floors for a living takes four years of experience and 16 hours of classroom time. That is 1,463 days in all, roughly triple the average among states that license the trade, and most states do not license it at all.²¹ This is not a joke.

• Where information asymmetries exist, voluntary certification (credentialing that signals quality without prohibiting unlicensed competitors) is the market’s own solution. Consumers are capable of evaluating credentials and reading reviews. Government doesn’t need to be involved.

  Read more: Occupational Licensing in Oregon — Institute for Justice

• Repeal the state minimum wage. It forbids employment agreements that a worker and an employer would otherwise accept, and the workers it prices out are the ones it was written for.

  Read more: Employment Effects of Minimum Wages — IZA World of Labor

• Repeal state and local restrictions on gig work, independent contracting, and flexible employment. Laws like AB5-style reclassification mandates destroy the work arrangements that many workers — particularly part-time workers, caregivers, and people building skills — deliberately choose.

The minimum wage has a history its current defenders rarely discuss. It was championed in the early 20th century by Progressive Era reformers and labor economists who said openly that its purpose was to price “unemployable” workers — women, Black Americans, immigrants, the disabled — out of the labor market. This is not a libertarian reinterpretation. It is in the published work of the people who built the policy. The mechanism has not changed. The euphemism has. Whatever anyone intends by it now, the law still finds the same people.

Read more: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era — Thomas C. Leonard, Journal of Economic Perspectives (PDF)

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Taxation

Position: The money is not the state’s to begin with. Oregon taxes what you earn, what a company takes in whether or not it profits, and the house you finished paying for, and will only argue about the percentages.

Oregon’s top state rate of 9.9% starts at $125,000 of taxable income for a single filer, a working professional’s salary in Portland, not a wealthy one.²² Then the local layers arrive. Metro’s Supportive Housing Services tax adds 1%. Multnomah County’s Preschool for All tax adds 1.5%, and 3% above $250,000. A single filer in this county with taxable income over $250,000 pays 13.9% to Salem, Metro, and the county before the federal government has been heard from; in 2027 the county rate rises another 0.8 points and the total reaches 14.7%.²³ The state also imposes corporate taxes, the Corporate Activity Tax (a gross receipts tax that takes its share even when a business loses money), payroll taxes, and a dense lattice of local levies and fees. When businesses can’t afford to grow, the workers who don’t get hired pay the price too.

Both local taxes were approved at the ballot. A majority vote settles who wins an election. It does not settle whose money it was.

Read more: State Individual Income Tax Rates — Tax Foundation

Taxation is not a contribution. It is the extraction of money under threat of force from people who have harmed no one, by an institution that has never been required to demonstrate it spent the last extraction well before demanding the next one.

The practical case against it is equally strong: every dollar collected and redistributed through government passes through a system with administrative overhead, political distortion, and no way for the person paying to decline. Elections are not a refund. The alternative is not chaos. It is individuals, families, businesses, and voluntary associations deploying their own resources according to their own judgment. Government calls this “lost revenue.” Everyone else calls it “keeping what you earned.” No other institution gets to describe your paycheck as its loss.

The poor in this district are not under-taxed. They are over-licensed, over-policed, and over-zoned. Salem’s idea of solidarity is another bureau.

Positions:

• Oppose all tax increases, categorically.
• Repeal the Corporate Activity Tax. A gross receipts tax is economically illiterate: it taxes companies that are losing money and distorts business decisions in ways that harm workers and consumers.
• Support repeal of the state income tax. Oregon’s reliance on income tax makes state revenues extremely volatile and punishes the one activity government should be least interested in discouraging: productive work.
• Oppose local income taxes. Salem does not vote on a county tax, but it does vote on whether counties and regional governments may impose one: against every bill that widens that authority, for any bill that withdraws it. Preschool for All and Supportive Housing Services should be repealed by the voters who enacted them.
• Tax expenditures (credits and deductions) are preferable to equivalent spending programs — paying less tax is better than paying more and getting some back — but they obscure the true cost of government and allocate investment based on political favoritism rather than market signals.
• Property tax is a claim by the government that you occupy your home at its pleasure, rent paid to the state for the privilege of not being evicted from what you already own. Oregon’s Measures 5 and 50 layer arbitrary inequities on top of that, but the design flaws are not the objection. The tax itself is. Abolish it.

Public Transportation

Position: Let riders pay for rides. Fares cover about seven cents of every dollar TriMet spends running the system. The rest arrives whether you ride or not.

TriMet is treated in Oregon political culture as a public good beyond scrutiny. It is not. It is a subsidized government monopoly that imposes real costs on non-riders, cannot cover its own operating expenses, and is structurally insulated from the market feedback that would force any private operator to improve or exit.

The fiscal reality: TriMet forecasts $62.7 million in passenger revenue for FY2026 against roughly $900 million in day-to-day operating requirements, about seven cents on the dollar.²⁴ There is no plausible path to self-sufficiency, and none is seriously proposed. The money comes chiefly from a payroll tax on employers in the district, which arrives on schedule regardless of whether the trains do. Your neighborhood lemonade stand has better unit economics.

Buses are heavy, and pavement damage rises with roughly the fourth power of axle load. That is standard highway engineering. A loaded 40-foot bus can do the damage of somewhere between twelve hundred and ten thousand cars in a single pass.²⁵ TriMet’s battery-electric buses add several tons on the same two axles, and an empty bus does nearly the damage of a full one. None of that appears in a fare. It is laid in asphalt and billed to whoever lives on the corridor. Buses also stop in travel lanes without pullouts, and the delay is paid by every driver behind them.

MAX light rail is worse. Tracks permanently consume traffic lanes, grade crossings halt traffic in every direction each time a train passes, and the signal preemption system confuses drivers navigating unfamiliar intersections. TriMet builds these lines with the condemnation power at its back: on the Portland–Milwaukie light rail project it valued one owner’s property at $19,700, and establishing the real figure — $118,117, six times TriMet’s — took a trial.²⁶ For the $175 million Division bus rapid transit line, it planned permanent and temporary takings from parts of more than 140 properties along the corridor, then began filing condemnation actions against the owners with whom it had not reached agreement.²⁷ The condemnation bar writes that last word in quotation marks. The land changes hands either way. The only question is whether the owner can afford to argue about the price.

The Interstate Bridge Replacement carries the pattern to its conclusion. A 1.9-mile MAX extension into Vancouver sits inside a program whose estimate rose from $6 billion in 2022 to $14.4 billion in March 2026. The response to that number was to fund a first phase that designs the transit crossing without laying any track: no service before 2036, and a federal grant decision that will not arrive until 2030. Vancouver’s mayor, who wants the extension built, put the problem to her own side plainly: “All of the opponents get it. They can say they’re building a light rail to nowhere.”²⁸

Positions:

• Oppose all operating subsidies for TriMet and any expansion of the transit network funded by government debt or taxation.
• Support opening transit corridors to private operators. If routes are genuinely valuable, private providers can serve them without a captive tax base. Portland’s regulatory framework effectively prohibits jitneys and microtransit, protections that exist to insulate TriMet from competition, not to serve riders.

• TriMet should be privatized or dissolved. Transit does not require government provision any more than freight shipping or air travel.

  Read more: Fixing Transit: The Case for Privatization — Cato Institute

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Environment & Energy

Position: Sue the polluter, don’t license him. A polluter who fouls your land, your water, or your lungs owes you compensation; an agency that sells him a permit owes you nothing.

Environmental protection in Oregon is administered the way the state administers everything else described on this page: as a permission market run by agencies, paid for by everyone, and accountable to no one in particular. The principled alternative is older and stricter — property rights. Pollution that damages a specific person’s land, water, air, or health is a trespass, and the polluter owes the victim. A court adjudicating a trespass cannot grant permission to harm. An agency can — that is its core product. Regulation converts pollution into a licensing question: pay the fee, hold the permit, and the harm becomes legal.

The Climate Protection Program is the case study. When the legislature declined for nearly twenty years to pass a carbon bill, the program arrived by executive order instead. It lets 36 of the state’s largest natural gas users defer compliance to 2028, routes compliance payments not to the state but to nonprofits DEQ has yet to select, and was adopted without an estimate of what it would cost Oregonians. DEQ’s greenhouse gas programs manager explained why: “We’re not really in a role to be estimating or anticipating what each company will do vis-à-vis this program.”²⁹

The Court of Appeals struck the program down in 2023 for failing the disclosure requirements of its own rulemaking. DEQ re-adopted it and started again in 2025. It is now being challenged a second time by nearly thirty petitioners — manufacturers, gas utilities, and labor unions — with the court agreeing in July to hear the case on an expedited schedule. W. Paul Elder of UA Local 290, the plumbers and pipefitters, swore in his declaration that the program “harms every consumer and every layer of business in Oregon.”³⁰ When the union and the manufacturer file on the same side, attention should be paid.

Cap-and-trade does not make anyone whole. It creates a market in government permissions, and like every permission market, it is dominated by whoever can afford the permissions, exempts whoever has the lobbyists, and bills whoever has neither.

Positions:

• Repeal the Climate Protection Program. A rule with no cost estimate, enacted without the legislature, is not climate policy. It is administrative fiat.
• Oppose cap-and-trade and carbon pricing at every level of government.
• Repeal renewable energy mandates. Mandates raise electricity rates, among the most regressive costs government can impose, while insulating utilities from accountability for the choice.
• Restore tort and trespass remedies for environmental harm. A polluter who damages identifiable people or property should compensate them fully, in court, without a permit as a shield.
• End energy subsidies of every kind, fossil and renewable alike. The state should not be picking energy sources any more than grocery brands.
• End the state’s practice of exempting itself and its favored operators from the standards it imposes on everyone else.

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Immigration

Position: The border is not on the ballot here. Salem decides whether Oregon lends its jails and its data to federal enforcement, and whether an immigrant who already has a trade is allowed to practice it.

A person does not lose the right to work, trade, or rent a home by being born on the wrong side of a line. Free movement of labor follows from the same premises as every other position here: self-ownership and voluntary exchange. An agreement between a willing worker and a willing employer is not the federal government’s to approve, and it is certainly not Salem’s to police on the federal government’s behalf.

A state legislator casts no vote on border policy. What a state legislator votes on is whether Oregon participates: whether state and local personnel, data, and jail space are lent to federal enforcement. They should not be. And the most binding immigration controls in Oregon are not federal at all. They are the state’s own licensing walls. The occupational licensing regime described under Removing Barriers to Work falls hardest on immigrants, for whom a trade learned over a lifetime is illegal to practice without years of incumbent-designed credentialing. A state that wanted immigrants to prosper would not need a new program. It would need to delete the ones standing in their way.

Positions:

• Maintain and strengthen Oregon’s sanctuary status: no state or local personnel, data, or jail space for federal immigration enforcement.
• Oppose any state E-Verify mandate. Requiring federal permission before taking a job treats the right to work as a government grant.
• Repeal the licensing barriers that lock immigrants out of legal work (see Removing Barriers to Work).
• Support free movement of labor. A path to citizenship is a second-best remedy that presumes the legitimacy of the underlying controls; relief for people already living and working here should not wait on that presumption.

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Abortion

Position: The same power forbids and compels. A legislature trusted to prohibit a medical decision is the one that will later require one; keep it out of the room and off the invoice.

This section is short because the position is that the legislature has no business here — from either direction.

Self-ownership settles it. What a person does with their own body is not a legislative question, and a state empowered to prohibit a medical decision is the same state empowered to mandate one. I oppose legal restrictions on abortion. I also oppose taxpayer funding of it: Oregon currently funds abortion through state programs, which forces people with sincere moral objections to pay for what they consider a grave wrong. The two major parties offer the two flavors of state involvement: one would use government power to prohibit, the other uses it to subsidize. The consistent position, the one neither party can offer, is that the state stays out: not as prohibitor, not as paymaster.

Positions:

• Oppose all legal restrictions on abortion.
• Oppose taxpayer funding of abortion, as of any medical procedure; repeal state-funded coverage mandates.
• Neutrality is the position: no prohibition, no subsidy, no role.

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What This Campaign Is Not

This platform does not promise that libertarian policies will solve every problem painlessly or immediately. Markets produce better outcomes than political allocation over time, but markets also reveal real scarcities that subsidies and mandates have been masking. Some of those revelations will be uncomfortable. That is what honesty costs.

What this campaign does promise is that you will not be lied to. Where government helps, it helps with money taken by force from people who did not consent. The people of District 42 are capable of running their own lives without a legislature’s supervision. Every election, candidates from both parties tell you they’ll fight for you, meaning they’ll spend your money, expand their authority, and never once ask whether you wanted the help.

Government is not your guardian, your parent, or your salvation. It is an institution that takes money under threat of imprisonment from people who have harmed no one and distributes it according to political incentive.

On Not Winning

District 42 is one of the safest Democratic seats in Oregon, and a win here would put one Libertarian in a chamber of sixty. Both are true.

A legislature runs less on votes than on what its members can be relied upon not to say. A member who needs no caucus, no endorsement and no donor can describe a bill accurately on the floor while it is still a bill. Salem’s worst work is not done over objections. It is done in their absence.

The rest is the number. Both parties read returns, and an unopposed incumbent has been told the record is satisfactory. Absent this campaign, that is the message this district would have sent. A serious share of the ballots going to someone who wants the office abolished says something they cannot file away, and it is the only part of this campaign the legislature is obliged to read.