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An Interview With David Theroux
What
is the mission of The Independent Institute, and what does it do to
achieve that mission? The
Independent Institute is a non-partisan, scholarly, public policy
research and educational organization that conducts peer-reviewed
studies of major economic, social, legal, and environmental issues. Through the production and publication of books, The Independent Review
(quarterly journal),
conferences, and media and other programs, The Independent Institute
regularly identifies and advances pioneering, libertarian and
free-market solutions in order to boldly redefine and redirect public
debate. Our mission is to win the war of ideas, and we utilize every
available means to do so. One
of the things that the Institute is known for is its scholarly journal The
Independent Review. How
can one subscribe? Our
quarterly journal , The
Independent Review, is edited by the distinguished economist and
historian, Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The
Independent Institute. While it is a scholarly journal—that is, it
adheres to rigorous academic standards of peer-review for all
articles--it is also edited to be readable. Rather than relying on
arcane jargon or movement hype, its articles are written in clear and
lucid English. Individual
subscriptions are available for $28.95 per year (www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/subs.html)
or are complimentary as part of anyone becoming an Independent Associate
Member with a tax-deductible contribution of $500 or more. Independent
Associates can also receive complimentary copies of new Institute books
and other publications along with other benefits. Membership information
can be found at www.independent.org/tii/tii_info/associat.html. What
did you do before you founded the Institute? My
educational background is that I received three undergraduate and
graduate degrees in applied mathematics and mechanical engineering from
the University
of California
and an MBA from the When
were you born, and where did you grow up? I
was born in 1949 in Lansing, Michigan, and I was primarily raised in the
suburbs of New York City, where I went to elementary school in
Westfield, N.J., middle school in Armonk, N.Y., and high school in New
Canaan, Conn. Incidentally, Dave Barry and I happened to both attend the
same middle school together. How
did you get a cool name like David Theroux?
Do people often ask you if it has anything to do with Henry David
Thoreau? Although
Thoreau has long been an inspiration for me, my full name is actually
David Jon Theroux, and I was named after my mother’s father, whose
name was John David Withrow. My
father’s family is originally from French Canada, where the first
Theroux in the After
my birth and during my first year, for business reasons, my parents
moved and we lived in Needham, Mass., a short distance from Which
people have influenced you the most? My
parents were enormous influences on me in my education and development
of personal values. My father was a mainstream liberal, and my mother
was a Goldwater conservative. My loving wife, Mary, has by far been the
greatest influence on me of anyone since. Ideologically,
I was earlier particularly influenced by the work of the Nobel Laureate
economist F.A. Hayek. In
1970, while I was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, I stumbled
across his essay, “Why I am not a conservative”, which had been
reprinted from his book, The
Constitution of Liberty. I found the essay intriguing, and
having free time on my hands, I soon read much of his other work, as
well as that of Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Israel Kirzner, Yale
Brozen, and many others. In addition, I first became aware of the work
of various revisionist historians such as Harry Elmer Barnes and James
J. Martin. I
was struck by the enormous power and relevance of classical liberal and
libertarian ideas. Especially during that period of social conflict, it
seemed to me that such ideas had enormous potential for the future.
Unfortunately, the libertarian paradigm was essentially unknown and had
little, if any, public standing. Indeed, the Zeitgeist
was strongly biased against such ideas. In
the process of my reading, I had discovered the Foundation for Economic
Education, Institute for Humane Studies, Rampart
I
soon learned of the diverse and very rich legacy of libertarian writers
and writing, which only confirmed my view of the power of libertarian
ideas, but also the sad and ironic fact that such ideas were virtually
unknown. It became clear to me that orthodox conservative and liberal
perspectives were not merely inadequate and in fact remarkably primitive
and unsophisticated, they persisted by default and not for the power of
their reasoning. This became particularly evident as one watched the
pathetic conduct of war and neo-mercantilism in the modern world. I
increasingly decided that in the course of my own career and in whatever
modest way I could, I would seek to work with others to effectively
create a new movement for liberty. What
are you passionate about? I
am passionate about the enduring values of integrity, honesty, truth,
justice, love, and the rights of all individuals to be free to make
their own choices and from aggression from others. I believe that life
is our great fortune and blessing that should not be taken for granted.
I am very passionate about advancing excellent programs that give the
ideas of liberty every opportunity to be heard and taken seriously. But
above all, I am very passionate about my wife and family and those who
share our ideals and dreams. How
would you describe your political philosophy?
Did it evolve over time? I
have always been very individualistic and self-reliant, in part because
when growing up, we moved quite a bit, and I did not have the
opportunity to develop long-term friendships with many other children.
My upbringing also educated me to believe firmly in the ideas and
legacy of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ vision for
a free republic. However,
my independence also has made me a skeptic of the claims of others.
Hence, although libertarian ideas came naturally to me, it took a while
for me to fully accept many of its applications until I had had the time
to closely examine the arguments and evidence involved. But upon my
doing so, I was fortunate to acquire a broad knowledge and deep
appreciation of libertarian ideas and the nuances of them that proved to
be of enormous value as I pursued my future work. When
and how did you become interested in liberty? During
the Vietnam War, I became increasingly disillusioned over the official
claims regarding the war and how these could be squared with basic
civilized values. Clearly, communism was a great enemy of liberty, but
killing innocent people and collectivizing American society was no
answer. Quite the contrary,
it only served to discredit in the minds of many that freedom was
dysfunctional and some form of central control was necessary. So,
I decided to try to understand what exactly was driving those who
opposed the war and whether there were libertarian elements that could
be tapped. I began subscribing to various anti-war and counter-culture
publications such as the Berkeley Barb. I found that on clear issues of opposing mass murder
and aggression against peaceful people, it was more likely that average
students who shared doubts about the war were more libertarian than were
the members of such groups as Young Americans for Freedom, who supported
the increased bombing of cities while claiming to be for free choice and
the Constitution. I
then sought to carve out and project a more consistent libertarian
vision that would appeal to people whose consciousness had at least been
raised to the level of recognizing and opposing the fact that a
government conscripting people to slaughter the innocent and otherwise
exercising arbitrary power over others was wrong and certainly
fundamentally at odds with the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, George Mason,
et al. This
led me to create the Bay Area Libertarian League that then created
chapters on numerous college campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area in
order to host events, distribute libertarian publications, and otherwise
recruit people to libertarian ideas. In the process, we worked with any
and all libertarian, free market-friendly, civil liberties, and anti-war
groups. Who
are your heroes, and why? My
number one hero is my wife, Mary, whose opinions, courage, and
impeccable character and wisdom I greatly treasure.
My other heroes are people of enormous personal character who
have shunned political and personal opportunism and strove without
compromise for truth, liberty, peace and justice despite adversity.
I am referring to an enormously rich history of people such as
John Locke, Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Acton,
Frederic Bastiat, Gustave de Molinari, Herbert Spencer, Germaine de
Stael, Rose Wilder Lane, Richard Cobden, Lysander Spooner, Thomas
Gordon, Ludwig von Mises, William Graham Sumner, Murray Rothbard,
Voltairine de Cleyre, H.L. Mencken, Benjamin Constant, Thomas Szasz,
Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, and many others. Some of these people
made errors and may have been inconsistent, but their commitment to
truth and excellence shines as a beacon for us all today and for the
future. Libertarianism
is a theory of justice, and anyone who works tirelessly to advance such
a crucial standard of the rule of law is a hero to me.
Those whose actions cut corners and work to undercut this
standard are at best irrelevant to the future of liberty, but more
likely part of the problem, regardless of how they describe their own
views. Heroes of today are hence all of those people who stand
forthright against the lies and power politics of the welfare-warfare
state. Who
are some of the most interesting or remarkable people you’ve met? I
have had the great pleasure and privilege of meeting and working with an
enormous number of incredible people in a wide range of fields.
Some of these people include Ludwig von Mises, Thomas Szasz, F.
A. Hayek, Milton Friedman,
Anthony de Jasay, Robert Higgs, Peter Bauer, William Hutt, Arthur Seldon,
Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Merton Miller, Israel Kirzner, Arthur
Ekirch, F.A. Harper, Thomas Sowell, James J. Martin, Aaron Wildavsky,
Fritz Machlup, Joseph Peden, Jonathan Hughes, Gary Becker, Vaclav Klaus,
Henry Veatch, M. Bruce Johnson, Henry Manne, P.J. O’Rourke, Gordon
Tullock, Ralph Raico, Ronald Hamowy, Karl Menger, Richard Vedder, Bruce
Benson, Ronald Hartwell, Charles Murray, Nathan Rosenberg, Bruce Russett,
Richard Epstein, Vernon Smith, Harry Wu, E. G. West, Alvaro Vargas Llosa,
Jonathan Kwitny, Julian Simon, George Gilder, etc.
In addition, I have had the pleasure of working with such diverse
people as William Appleman Williams, Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham, Felix
Morley, Robert LeFevre, Czeslaw Milosc, Robert Conquest, John Templeton,
William Simon, Marvin Wolfgang, Walter Wriston, Robert Bartley, George
Stigler, Lloyd Gardner, Tom Peters, Nadine Strossen, Justus Doenecke,
Joyce Appleby, Nathan Glazer, John Stossel, Daniel Ellsberg, Nathaniel
Branden, Robert Dole, Jerry
Brown, James Bamford, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul, David Packard,
Alan Greenspan, Barton Bernstein, Martin Anderson, Alexander Cockburn,
George Shultz, and many others. There are just too many such people to
list properly. Which
countries have you visited? Would
you care to share some of your experiences from those countries? I
have had the opportunity to visit most countries in Europe, much of Which
kind of activism do you think is more effective, political or
non-political, and why? The
struggle for liberty is fundamentally a war of ideas. The paradigms of
statism and interventionism have ruled the minds of the best and
brightest for many decades, and unless we can win the war of ideas with
a superior ideological system, statism will only endure and intensify.
The political system that claims the right and necessity to impose rules
on us all is central to the problem, and by its very nature dissipates
resources into trivia and insists upon compromise with little or no
positive results. To accept its legitimacy and become ensnarled in its
web only exhausts limited resources and sidetracks from the real task of
discrediting the system itself. However,
every successful social movement is a combination of fostering a
persuasive intellectual movement that wins the hearts and minds of a
critical mass of the public combined with the consequent organization of
the public to take action to resist and “just say ‘No’” to state
power and realize the just application of such ideas. What
do you think are the most effective things an individual can do if he
wants to be free? The
first thing to do is learn all about the economics, ethics and the
history of liberty in order to understand the world and how it got to be
the way it is. The second
task is to find readily accessible and effective ways to apply such
ideas in order to influence opinion leaders and large numbers of the
public. We believe that the highly effective program of the Independent
Institute is perhaps the most cost-efficient way to do so, and anyone
who becomes a member not only tunes directly into the ideas of liberty
but leverages membership funding to directly affect many thousands of
academics and students, business and civic leaders, the media, and
countless millions of other people. What
do you think about the way the federal government has responded to
September 11? The
aftermath of 9/11 has been a textbook case of how war crises are used to
expand government power for the benefit of special interests and destroy
liberty in the process. The neo-conservatives who control the Bush
administration have sought for over ten years for an opportunity to
invade and conquer the The
result domestically has been record federal spending and deficits,
corporate welfare, protectionism, trampling of the Bill of Rights, and
economic stagnation. Internationally, the U.S.
is now viewed as an imperial bully that unapologetically lies to justify
its warfarism and remains arrogant despite the enormous bloodshed,
hardship and suffering caused to innocent others. Not
only did the federal government create the terrorists directly by its
earlier recruiting, organizing, funding, and arming of the Mujahadeen in
Afghanistan as well as such cutthroats as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Pervez
Musharraf in Pakistan, etc., but U.S. sanctions, covert operations,
foreign aid, and military interventionism in the Mideast and elsewhere
is the greatest danger today to world peace as increasing numbers of
Islamic extremists are being recruited worldwide in response to U.S.
hegemony, and the prospects for a neo-Marxist movement in Africa, Asia,
Latin America, and elsewhere grows more likely. What
do you think are the greatest current threats to liberty, and what do
you think we should do about them? The
greatest threats to liberty are U.S.
interventionist policies worldwide. The dangers are two-fold: (1) Such
interventionism fosters world conflict and bitter anti-U.S. sentiments
and enemies, endangering the liberty and safety of Americans here and
abroad as well as people worldwide, and (2) the “war on terrorism”
domestically is producing huge new grabs of government power as every
conceivable interest group pushes for its own share of the “terrorist
war” pie. What
are some great books you’ve read that most readers of The Root may not
have heard of? I
would strongly suggest that your readers read Crisis
and Leviathan, by Robert Higgs,
in order to understand the nature of government power and what is going
on now. Higgs authoritatively documents how and why “War is the health
of the state.” If you have
not read this book and/or articles based on it, you cannot really
understand liberty and be effective in combating statism. The
lesson to learn regarding what needs to be done is that the “Achilles
heel” of government power is the public mythology that persists that
claims that government protects people from crises and that government
officials must be given special powers whenever a crisis is declared. If
people were to understand that government power is inherently a scheme
to redistribute wealth from the many to the few and that interventionist
wars are a cover to do so, everything regarding the status of government
power would radically change. For
an extensive discussion and compendium of references on liberty and
government power, please visit OnPower.org. A
sampling of key books would include the following: Bacevich,
Andrew J. American Empire: The
Realities and Consequences of
U.S.
Diplomacy. Barnes,
Harry Elmer, ed. Perpetual War for
Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Benson,
Bruce. To Serve and Protect:
Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice. Hummel,
Jeffrey Rogers. Emancipating
Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War. Liggio,
Leonard P. and James J. Martin, eds., Watershed
of Empire: Essays on New Deal Foreign Policy. Martin,
James J. Revisionist Viewpoints:
Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition. Martin,
James J. The Saga of Mearsheimer,
John J. The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics. Mises,
Ludwig von. Omipotent Government:
The Rise of the
Total
State
and Total War. Porter,
Bruce. War and the Rise of the
State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics. What
do you like to do when you’re not working at the Institute? Aside from plotting the demise of statism, my favorite pastimes are reading, swimming, travel, good food, films and music, and spending time with family and friends. Thanks, David!
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