Josephine County Voters will soon go to the polls, or mailboxes, to vote on two measures that would not be necessary, since the problems they deal with would not exist, if we lived in a Libertarian society as envisioned by The Founding Fathers.
The first involves a non-binding, advisory vote on whether Josephine County should join Idaho and get out of Oregon, since the horrendous level of taxation and regulation under the Kitzhaber-Brown governorships sucks money out of poor rural counties, like Josephine, and wastes it on bloated state-bureaucrat salaries and pensions, along with huge welfare dispensations. The working poor are bled in Oregon, with one of the highest income taxes on the poor in the US, while corporations pay not one iota of income tax. Truly a slave state is Oregon, masquerading as a liberal Democrat State. A State that keeps primates in cages and experiments on them. That is the “liberalism” of the Oregon Democrats and Leftists.
But in joining Idaho, the poor will be faced with a 6% sales tax, which doesn’t exist in Oregon. Many residents of Josephine County exist on tax-free pensions and welfare, so the lower income tax rate on businesses and workers in Idaho does these two groups no good.
Idaho has a sales tax on food, but gives a $100 tax credit when you file your taxes. The top income tax rate is 6.5% vs Oregon’s 10% which applies after you make just a few thousand dollars. Oregon also takes away the Federal standard deduction of $12,000, replacing it with an amount and credit that equates to a standard deduction in the low $4thousands. So Oregon rips off the poor worker thusly, while Idaho’s 6 percent sales tax, plus local governments can implement a 3% additional sales tax, might find you paying 9% more in some places in Idaho on anything you buy, including food.
The solution is not to join Idaho (though I will vote to join to show my disapprobation of the current administration in Salem), but rather for Josephine County (and perhaps some adjoining counties in Oregon and Northern California) to form a new State which, in the libertarian spirit of the Founding Fathers, I think should be named “Jefferson State”, or, because of the many American Indian tribes who have their tribal homelands in this area (the Klamath, the Hurok, the Takelma, etc) it might be given an Indigenous name.
This parallels Norman Mailer’s call to have New York City declare itself a State, when he ran for Mayor of New York (and was endorsed by Murray Rothbard), since New York sent much more money to the Federal Government than it was getting in return, much as the working poor in rural mostly-conservative-voting counties send tax money to Salem to keep the state bureaucrats and PERS pensioners living in the style to which they have become accustomed.
The second unnecessary ballot measure that wouldn’t even exist in a Libertarian society, is a measure to repeal another measure that was enacted in response to the many problems that marijuana cultivation is causing in Josephine County, things like noise, increased traffic, the entrance of cartels into the area, and the exploitation of undocumented aliens who are often held in slave-like and unsanitary conditions.
The ordinance passed by the Josephine County Commissioners in a split vote was supposed to give law enforcement and code enforcement the tools to deal with complaints of which there were over 500 received. However, the ordinance was so riddled with legal loopholes that it has proven ineffective except to prosecute a few of the most egregious cases of abuse, but it has given the local bureaucrats additional powers to harass and prosecute landowners who have nothing to do with cannabis cultivation, the laws critics claim.
However the real cause of this problem is that cannabis is not legal at the national level, which would mean its cultivation would take place everywhere, and this tiny pocket of Oregon which has become a leading source of legal cannabis would no longer be the locus for all the marijuana growing in the US. It could be grown in Nebraska, and free-market supply and demand would drop the price to a level that only dedicated cannabis aficionados would bother to engage it its production, much like wine-bibbers.
An additional problem that attaches to the first additional problem is the call by some Josephine County “conservatives” for more funding for the sheriff’s department — the “if only we had more money, there would be no problem” mentality. To that end, the Josephine County Eagle, a throw paper with a strong Republican/Conservative lean, ran an article by someone who proposed about six different ways to raise funds for the sheriff’s department — all this remember to pay to fight a problem that would not exist in a libertarian society. Interestingly, none of these suggestions involved government-guaranteed Contract Insurance, which could fund the court system by having anyone who signed a contract, who wanted to use the government courts if a dispute arose, pay a miniscule percentage of the value of the contract to the government. They could sign a contract without that insurance, but then they couldn’t use the government courts if they wanted to sue. This Libertarian idea for the non-coercive funding of government is never mentioned by the “conservatives”, perhaps because it has never occurred to them.
When it comes to cannabis, complete national legalization would solve the problem, with no restrictions except things like driving under the influence, delivery to minors, certain professions having to abstain before going on shift, smoking within a certain distance of another, etc. Freedom and the Free Market would dissolve the current problems associated with marijuana growing, and drive down the price, if the government didn’t interfere.
So two useless, unnecessary ballot measures can now absorb the people of Josephine County as they argue about problems that would never exist if modern America had the skepticism and hatred that the Founding Fathers had for authoritarian government.
— Paul Grad, 2014 Libertarian Party of Oregon Gubernatorial Nominee
Paul Grad for Governor 