John McClaughry

John McClaughry is President of the Institute for Liberty and Community in Concord, Vermont; He was a Founder, board member and for 12 years chairman of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and former member of the Vermont House of Representatives and Vermont State Senate. John is the curator of the Decentralism File, a collection of over 110 key texts introduced on the Schumacher Center website in October, 2023.

John grew up in downstate Illinois and was graduated from Miami University, from which he received an honorary doctorate in 1992. He also was awarded Master’s degrees in nuclear engineering (Columbia) and political science  (University of California – Berkeley), and was a Fellow of the Institute of Politics at  Harvard.

He was a senior policy advisor in Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign of 1980 and subsequently served in the White House Office of Policy Development until March 1982. He was appointed to four Presidential commissions by Presidents Nixon, Carter and Reagan.

 John McClaughry founded the Ethan Allen Institute in Vermont 1993 and served as its President until August 2009. The mission of the Institute is to influence public policy in Vermont by helping its people to better understand and put into practice the fundamentals of a free society: individual liberty, private property, competitive free enterprise, limited government, strong local communities, personal responsibility, and expanded opportunity for human endeavor. The Institute sponsors policy discussions, round tables, and debates as well as issuing a number of publications including the monthly Ethan Allen Letter.