Oregon State Senate · District 24
Morey Straus
Running on principle, not promises.
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Oregon State Senate · District 24
Running on principle, not promises.
Join the Libertarian Party of OregonThe Candidate
Candidate · Oregon State Senate · District 24
I am a Portland homeowner with a family. I work in the tech industry leading a software security team. I have a real stake in what Oregon's government does to housing costs, schools, and the business climate — and a professional understanding of what happens when bureaucratic compliance culture substitutes for actual competence. I am running for State Senate under the Libertarian Party because you deserve the option of voting for someone who thinks the premise is wrong — not just the management.
Every election, two parties compete to see who can better manage your life for you. This campaign proposes a different experiment: not managing it at all.
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 conclusion supported by decades of evidence, billions of 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. They are not separate. They are one system, and every link in the chain has a government intervention at its root.
Government sets a minimum wage that locks the least-skilled workers out of the job market. Occupational licensing closes off the informal alternatives. The person priced out of work and locked out of options falls into crisis. Some self-medicate — and drug prohibition ensures that happens with the most dangerous product available, at cartel prices, with a criminal record attached. Oregon’s mental health services, ranked dead last in the country, have crowded out the private and faith-based alternatives that produce comparable results at a fraction of the cost. And housing — made artificially scarce by growth boundaries, zoning, permitting delays, and rent control — ensures there is nowhere affordable to land when everything else falls apart.
Each section below unpacks one link in this chain. The common thread is that government created the problem, then asked for a bigger budget to treat the symptoms.
"Government is good at one thing: it knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you couldn't walk.'"
— Harry BrownePortland 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:
Read more: Rent Control’s Winners and Losers — Stanford GSB
And at the root of all of it — beyond anything a state senator can fix — is the disaster of central banking and fiat currency, which turned housing from shelter into the primary savings vehicle for a population whose money loses value by design.
On homelessness specifically: 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 visible on every block is public ownership. When the sidewalk in front of your business belongs to the city, you have no standing to maintain it — and when the city refuses to, no one can. You are taxed for the upkeep of property you do not control, then told to be compassionate about its deterioration. Private ownership solves this: an owner has both the authority and the incentive to act. Public ownership guarantees that no one does.
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.
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.
Oregon ranks dead last — 51st — for adult mental illness prevalence. The legislature’s response has been to increase funding for the same systems that produced that outcome. In any other enterprise this would be called doubling down on failure. In Salem it is called leadership.
The standard progressive diagnosis of the visible crisis is that deinstitutionalization went too far — that Oregon should rebuild the state hospital capacity it lost through the late 20th century. This gets the history half right. Oregon did reduce institutional capacity. It also, at the same time, built a regulatory wall that prevented anyone else from replacing what was lost. Licensing requirements, scope-of-practice rules, facility regulations, and Certificate-of-Need laws made it illegal or prohibitively expensive for churches, voluntary associations, and private operators to do what the institutions had done — at lower cost, with actual consent, and without the worst abuses of the institutional era. The result was predictable. It is on every block.
Positions:
Portland’s public safety situation deteriorated sharply after 2020 and has only partially recovered. The political response — oscillating between defunding and re-funding the same police bureaucracy — is not a debate. It is the same argument about how much to spend on an institution no one is allowed to replace.
The core problem is that policing is a government monopoly, insulated from competition and accountability.
Portland spent years tolerating trespassing, property crime, and open-air camps in the name of compassion. It was abdication — a monopoly on enforcement that refused to enforce. People and businesses forced to fund that failure should be free to contract for better alternatives. The city said no. The city always says no.
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:
Oregon has seen a sustained legislative push to restrict firearm ownership, culminating in Measure 114 — a ballot initiative requiring permits to purchase any firearm and banning magazines over ten rounds.
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. 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:
Private sellers, insurers, and property owners have always had — and should always have — the right to refuse any transaction they choose. The question has never been whether dangerous people can be screened out. It has been who gets to maintain the list.
Oregon’s public 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: public education is a government monopoly funded by compulsion and delivered without meaningful competition. The surprise is not that it performs poorly. The surprise is that anyone expects otherwise.
And it is worth remembering what the monopoly was built to do. The American public 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 institution performs its original purposes better than it performs the ones its modern defenders assign it. That is not a flaw. It is the design working as intended.
Positions:
Read more: Education: Free and Compulsory — Murray N. Rothbard, Mises Institute
Libertarians have good-faith disagreements on vouchers. The concern here is simple: every industry that accepted government funding on “neutral” terms eventually accepted government control of its operations. Education will not be the exception. It never is.
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:
Read more: Occupational Licensing in Oregon — Institute for Justice
Read more: Employment Effects of Minimum Wages — IZA World of Labor
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. The workers the law was designed to exclude are still the workers it excludes most reliably, and its defenders have simply stopped saying so out loud.
Read more: Illiberal Reformers — Thomas C. Leonard, Princeton University Press
Oregon has the highest effective income tax rate in the country for both single and joint filers. Portland adds the highest local income tax rate of any city in the nation. Oregon’s top state rate — 9.9% — kicks in at $125,000, a working professional’s income in Portland, not a wealthy one. When businesses can’t afford to grow, the workers who don’t get hired pay the price too. It also imposes corporate taxes, the Corporate Activity Tax (a gross receipts tax that taxes revenue even when businesses lose money), payroll taxes, and a dense lattice of local levies and fees.
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 feedback mechanism. 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.”
Positions:
"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."
— Frédéric BastiatTriMet 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’s farebox revenue covers only about 8.5% of operating costs as of FY2025, down from nearly 40% a decade ago. There is no plausible path to self-sufficiency, and none is seriously proposed. Your neighborhood lemonade stand has better unit economics.
Buses damage pavement at rates exponential to their weight — a PBOT spokesperson confirmed to KGW that a fully loaded transit vehicle causes as much pavement damage as 10,000 personal cars. TriMet’s battery-electric buses are heavier still. Routes operate well below capacity for much of the day, concentrating pavement destruction on corridors paid for by all taxpayers. Buses stop in travel lanes without pullouts, creating arterial congestion borne by every driver on those corridors.
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. MAX extensions have been built using eminent domain — TriMet condemned over 140 properties for the Division Transit Project alone and routinely offered owners a fraction of fair value, forcing them to litigate. In one Milwaukie line case, a jury returned a verdict six times TriMet’s original offer. The proposed Interstate Bridge Replacement includes a 1.9-mile MAX extension into Vancouver at a projected cost of $2 billion — over a billion dollars per mile — as part of a project whose total estimate just rose from $6 billion to $14.4 billion. This is not infrastructure. It is a monument to the political class that funds it.
Positions:
Read more: Fixing Transit: The Case for Privatization — Cato Institute
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. Government makes the problems it claims to solve worse. The people of District 24 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. Oregon has had every opportunity to prove otherwise. The invoice is in your mailbox.