Ron Paul

Ronald Ernest Ron Paul (born August 20, 1935) is an American physician, author, and politician who has been serving as the U.S. Representative for Texas's 14th congressional district, which includes Galveston, since 1997. He is a three-time candidate for President of the United States, as a Libertarian in 1988 and as a Republican in 2008 and currently 2012. He is a member of the Republican Party. He holds libertarian views and is a critic of American foreign, domestic, and monetary policies, including the military–industrial complex, the War on Drugs, and the Federal Reserve. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Paul is a graduate of Gettysburg College and Duke University School of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree. He served as a medical officer in the United States Air Force from 1963 until 1968. He worked as an obstetrician-gynecologist from the 1960s to the 1980s, delivering more than 4,000 babies. He became the first Representative in history to serve concurrently with a child in the Senate when his son Rand Paul was elected to the United States Senate for Kentucky in 2010. As well as publicizing the ideas of Austrian Economists such as Murray Rothbard and Ludwig Von Mises during his political campaigns, Paul has also been an active writer on the topics of political and economic theory. In addition to contributing economic literature to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, he has written many books, beginning with The Case for Gold (1982) and including Liberty Defined (2011), End The Fed (2009), The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008), Pillars of Prosperity (2008), and A Foreign Policy of Freedom (2007). Paul has been characterized as the intellectual godfather of the Tea Party movement, however since the movement's beginnings as a non-partisan protest against wasteful government spending, many prominent Republican Pundits and Strategists began to adopt the label. Today, many self-identified Tea Party members hold views which align more closely with neo-conservatism, as opposed to Paul's small-government libertarian views. On July 12, 2011, Paul announced that he would forgo seeking another term in Congress in order to focus on his presidential bid. On May 14, 2012, Paul announced that he would not be competing in any other Presidential primaries, but that he would still compete for delegates in states where the primary elections have already been held.