By Naomi Inman
Early this December, Governor Tina Kotek’s newsroom unveiled “Oregon’s Prosperity Roadmap” and laid out “three broad goals” to retain and grow business, catalyze job creation, and accelerate its economic growth.
According to an essay by economist Eric Fruits, Ph.D., Oregon’s governors have been cycling through iterations of economic campaigns since Neil Goldschmidt initiated “Oregon Shines” in 1989.
Fifty years earlier in 1939, Oregon’s 22nd governor, Charles A. Sprague (term 1939-1943; life 1887-1969), laid out his concerns and aspirations on “the economic problem of Oregon” in his inaugural address. The Oregon Historical Society features a line from his speech in forged letters on its courtyard wall.
“In the long history of humanity, the most precious spark is that of individual freedom.”
An educator become journalist, Sprague managed the Oregon Statesman newspaper before and long after being elected Governor. He served at a time when tyrants rose to power and collectivist states snuffed out the “precious spark” of untold millions.
From that moment in history, he delivered the lines,
“It is precisely at this point that the greatest danger in modern trends of government lies. For the individual does not exist for the state, but the state for the individual. In the long history of humanity, the most precious spark is that of individual freedom. It is not too much to say that all human progress flows out of the initiative, energy and resourcefulness of the individual which flower best under conditions of liberty.”
Sprague’s 30-page address walks through Oregon’s economic challenges milepost-by-milepost. With a state GDP of less than $3 billion compared to $300 billion today, he inherited a resource-based economy deeply affected by the Great Depression, with 15 percent joblessness, and heavily dependent on federal New Deal spending rather than private sector expansion.
His inaugural address emphasized freedom, responsibility, and recovery. It reads like a roadmap guided by the notion that the atomic “spark” of individual freedom ignites human ingenuity and drives free individuals to turn matter into resources and create wealth to serve their community. He emphasized that long-term prosperity depended on productive enterprise rather than permanent public support.
While Kotek acknowledges Oregon’s economic decline, Fruits’ essay concludes, she prescribes “administrative palliatives” to solve root causes of “structural, statutory and fiscal problems.” Her map rehearses how the state, via new bureaucratic engines and programs, will be the driver of prosperity and dole it out to recipients by dictate.
Oregon’s policies need to change, but not by the same system that created them. Oregon must recover a 1939-era clarity of purpose: prioritizing growth and opportunity over administrative accumulation and political inertia.
Investors in Oregon’s future deserve more than the same roadmap we’ve traveled for 35 years with an updated cover. Oregon needs an open road that depends less on government involvement and more on leadership who have the will and muscle to remove prosperity-crushing obstacles that restrict productive capacity: tax complexity, regulatory barriers, land-use rigidity, energy contraction, and decaying infrastructure among many others.
All roads have off-ramps, which the continuing exodus of capital and talent illustrates. Many are ditching Oregon’s obstacle course and taking their sweet rides to cruise (mostly) east—into the sunrise of better opportunity. People aren’t inspired to shoulder ever-increasing loads to serve the state coffers, not in Oregon or any other state.
All roads have on-ramps. The on-ramp to prosperity is the “precious spark” of individual freedom. Oregon’s prosperity roadmap must follow the path of liberty.
Naomi Inman is External Affairs Manager at Cascade Policy Institute Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. As a staff journalist and writer, Naomi helps Cascade make the case for free-market policies through media affairs and publications.
