United States Senator for Kentucky

Dr. Rand Paul is the junior United States Senator for Kentucky. Elected in 2010, he has proven to be an outspoken champion for constitutional liberties and fiscal responsibility, and a warrior against government overreach. Among his first legislative proposals: cutting $500 billion in federal spending and a plan to balance the federal budget in just five years. He has since introduced similar bills with growing support. In the Senate, Rand serves on the Foreign Relations; Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; Homeland Security and Government Affairs; and Small Business Committees.

A graduate of Duke University School of Medicine, Rand was a practicing ophthalmologist in Bowling Green, Kentucky, for 17 years. In 1995, he founded the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic, an organization that provides eye exams and surgery to needy families and individuals. Today, even as a U.S. Senator, he continues to provide pro-bono eye surgery to Kentuckians in need of care.

Rand has been a vocal advocate for term limits, a balanced-budget amendment, a Read the Bills Act, and an audit of the Federal Reserve. He has gained prominence for his independent positions on many political issues.

In 2013, Time magazine named Rand as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Rand has been married for over 20 years to Kelley Ashby of Russellville, Kentucky, and they have three sons. He is the son of former Republican Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas.

Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago
Professor of Economic History, Gothenburg University, Sweden

Deirdre McCloskey teaches economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A well-known economist and historian and rhetorician, she has written sixteen books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistics to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. She is known as a "conservative" economist, Chicago-School style (she taught for 12 years there), but protests that "I'm a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not 'conservative'! I'm a Christian libertarian." Her latest book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010), which argues that an ideological change rather than saving or exploitation is what made us rich, is the second in a series of four on The Bourgeois Era. The first was The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), asking if a participant in a capitalist economy can still have an ethical life (briefly, yes). With Stephen Ziliak she wrote in 2008, The Cult of Statistical Significance (2008), which criticizes the proliferation of tests of "significance," and was in 2011 the basis of a Supreme Court decision.

For information on previous Simon Award winners please visit: http://cei.org/julian-l-simon-memorial-award