Morey Straus

Morey Straus' career experience includes working as a technology executive.[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I'm a Portland homeowner running for the state house on the Libertarian ticket. The short version of why: I think the Oregon legislature does more harm than the problems it claims to solve, and the people of District 42 deserve a candidate who will say that plainly rather than campaign on managing the damage more competently.

My starting premises are simple. You own yourself. You own what you produce. Agreements between consenting adults don't require legislative approval. An institution that funds itself by threatening you with a cage if you don't pay is not your benefactor, no matter what services it offers.

Oregon has run a long experiment in activist government. The results are in. The state has the highest rate of adult mental illness in the country. It has the highest effective income tax rate in the nation. Its homeless population reached a record 27,119 last year. In 2025 it shed jobs with no recession to blame — the first time since 1990. The legislature's response has been to double down on the same policies that produced these outcomes. At some point you have to ask whether the institution is capable of learning.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

Oregon's mental health crisis isn't a funding problem. The state has poured billions into a system that has presided over the worst adult mental illness prevalence in the country, blocked new private providers through certificate-of-need litigation, and responded to an active healthcare collapse with a non-binding resolution declaring things will be better in 2033. The chair of the committee that oversees this system is my opponent. He has stated publicly that the problem is too much care being available. That is not a person who can fix what is broken.Portland's signature crises — homelessness, addiction, mental illness, unaffordable housing — are not separate problems requiring separate budgets. They are one system. The state prices the least-skilled out of legal work with a minimum wage, licenses every informal alternative out of existence, criminalizes the substances people use to numb the despair that follows, runs a mental-health monopoly with the nation's worst mental-illness rate, then restricts housing supply so there is nowhere left to land. Government created each link, then billed you to manage the symptoms. Private and voluntary alternatives — faith-based recovery, mutual aid, competitive schooling, independent practice — deliver better results without the use of force.This campaign is an objection, not an application. I am not interviewing to run the machine better. I am making the case — on the ballot, in public — that the machine itself is the problem, and that the people it claims to serve would be better off without it.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

Housing, and everything downstream of it. Oregon has spent billions on the problem. The result: 27,119 Oregonians homeless, up 35% in two years, and permits at a decade low. That isn't a funding shortfall. It's zoning, growth boundaries, permitting delays, and rent control; legal barriers protecting existing owners from competition. Repeal them and housing gets built.

The rest is the same story. Minimum wage laws and occupational licensing lock people out of the bottom of the labor market. Drug prohibition leaves supply in cartel hands. Oregon's state-dominated mental health system ranks 51st of 51. We treat these as separate crises with separate budgets. They're one sequence of policy choices, and the street is where the sequence ends.

Who do you look up to? Whose example would you like to follow, and why?

Murray Rothbard. Not as a political model, since he never held office, but as an intellectual one. He was a walking encyclopedia: economics, moral philosophy, legal theory, and history, and he worked in all of them at once because he understood they were one subject. He wrote a treatise on economics, a book on the ethics of liberty, a multivolume history of colonial America, and a history of economic thought, and the same first principles run through all of it. That is the example I would want to follow: do the reading, argue from a premise you can state plainly, and follow it wherever it leads even when the conclusion is inconvenient. Most political argument fails because nobody has done the work underneath it.

What characteristics or principles are most important for an elected official?

Willingness to be unpopular. An official who only says what a majority already agrees with adds nothing that a poll couldn't. Second, putting the burden of proof on the person proposing to use force. Every law is enforced at gunpoint eventually, so the question is never whether a goal is good but whether it justifies that. Third, judging policy by outcomes rather than intentions, and being willing to repeal what failed. Oregon has spent decades funding programs whose results are measurable and bad, and almost nobody loses office over it. Fourth, consistency: apply the same standard to your allies as to your opponents, and never grant yourself a power you would not want your worst opponent to hold next term. They will hold it eventually.

What do you believe are the core responsibilities for someone elected to this office?

A state senator's actual job is narrower than campaign rhetoric suggests: write and vote on statutes, approve a budget, confirm appointments, and oversee the agencies the legislature created. I would take the last two more seriously than most, because they are where the real power sits and where almost no attention goes. Oversight means asking what a program produced, and ending the ones that failed. Repeal is a legislative act equal in standing to passage, and Oregon needs more of it. Beyond that: read the bills before voting, decline to delegate lawmaking to agencies through vague statutes, and treat constituent service as helping people get out from under the state rather than helping the state process them.

What legacy would you like to leave?

That I turned a few minds. Not a statute, not a building, not a seat held for a decade. When something goes wrong in this state, the reflex is to ask what the legislature should do about it, and that reflex is so automatic most people never notice they have it. I would like to have shaken it loose in a few hundred voters and left them with a different first question: what would people do here if they were free to cooperate voluntarily, and what is stopping them? Once someone sees that the free market is not a policy to be weighed against government action but the ordinary result of leaving people alone, they do not unsee it. That spreads on its own, and it outlasts anything I could pass.

What was your very first job? How long did you have it?

Fast food, and I was probably there for two years. I liked unloading the deliveries, but not the cooking, cleaning and registers.

What is something that has been a struggle in your life?

There were stretches of my life I would not want to repeat. I came out of them with more empathy than I would have had otherwise.

What do you believe is the ideal relationship between the governor and state legislature?

The separation of powers was designed to produce friction, and friction is the point, not a malfunction to be engineered away. A legislature that sees itself as a partner in the governor's agenda has stopped being a check on it. In practice that means three things: pass statutes specific enough that agencies cannot write the actual law afterward, take confirmation votes seriously instead of treating them as courtesies, and refuse to let emergency powers substitute for legislation. When a governor governs by order for months, the legislature that permitted it gave away a power it does not own and cannot get back on its own. Cooperation between the branches is not a virtue. It is usually the sound of a check going unused.

What do you perceive to be your state's greatest challenges over the next decade?

The doom loop that follows from being hostile to employers and high earners. Oregon's top income tax rate hits at $125,000, which in Portland is a working professional, and the combined burden with local taxes is among the highest in the country. The people and firms carrying that load are the ones most able to leave, so they leave first. Revenue falls, the remaining base is taxed harder to cover it, services degrade anyway, and the people who cannot leave inherit fewer employers, less opportunity, and a city getting angrier about it. Strife follows scarcity. The way out is not a new revenue stream. It runs the other direction: services paid for by the people who choose to use them, and nothing taken from anyone who does not.

Do you believe that compromise is necessary or desirable for policymaking?

Horse trading is never on the table. Backing a new restriction to buy a repeal elsewhere leaves the statute book no shorter and concedes that the restriction was legitimate, and that concession is the whole game. Salem makes that trade constantly and calls it getting things done. Compromising on degree is a different thing entirely, and I would not even call it compromise. If the licensing board cannot be abolished and someone puts up a bill exempting twenty trades, that is a yes without hesitation. Taking a partial win is arithmetic, not a concession. What I will not do is author the halfway measure myself. Someone else can champion the reform version. My job is to make the case nobody is making, then vote for whatever gets closest.

What was the first historical event that happened in your lifetime that you remember?

The fall of the Berlin Wall. I didn't fully understand the geopolitics, but I understood that something everyone had treated as permanent had simply stopped being permanent. An entire architecture of coercion gave way because the people behind it stopped believing in it. That observation has stayed with me. Institutions rest on consent even when they pretend they don't.