30th Anniversary: A Gala for the Future of Liberty

P.J. O'Rourke, a Founding Member of the Independent Institute’s Board of Advisors, is America’s leading political humorist and the best-selling author of 16 books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. After graduating from Miami University of Ohio and attending the graduate program at Johns Hopkins University, O’Rourke began his career of skewering both the left and the right on the ends of his razor-sharp one-liners.

A regular panelist on NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! and a member of the editorial board for World Affairs, O’Rourke is the former editor-in-chief of The National Lampoon and a popular contributor to a host of publications, as well as Foreign Affairs Desk Chief for Rolling Stone, and correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, during which he traveled to wars, riots, rebellions, and other "Holidays in Hell" in more than 40 countries.

Among his many best-selling books are the new Thrown Under the Omnibus, reviewed here in the Wall Street Journal; Republican Party Reptile; Holidays in Hell; Parliament of Whores; All the Trouble in the World; Eat the Rich; On the Wealth of Nations: Books That Changed the World; and The Baby Boom.

Timothy C. Draper is the Founding Partner of Draper Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. His original idea to use "viral marketing" in web-based email to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and YahooMail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses.

Recognized as a leading supporter of entrepreneurship, Mr. Draper was listed as #46 of the most outstanding Harvard alumni, #7 on the Forbes Midas List, #1 of the Most Networked Venture Capitalists by Always On, and #98 in Worth Magazine’s 100 Most Powerful People in Finance, and he received the World Entrepreneurship Forum’s “2015 Entrepreneur for the World.”

Mr. Draper is the Founder and Chairman of BizWorld Foundation that teaches entrepreneurship and business to children. He also serves on the Harvard Business School Board of Dean’s Advisors, and he has been a member of the California State Board of Education, U.C. Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Singapore's International Economic Council, and Ukraine's Orange Circle. He also launched a California statewide cyber-initiative on school choice, and he has led an initiative to create six new states in California (“Six Californias”) to encourage competition and choice in government. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Yeonmi Park is the renowned, twenty-three-year-old, human-rights activist and North Korean refugee and defector who has become a leading voice of oppressed people around the world. Her 2014 article about North Korea’s “Black Market Generation” in the Washington Post has created a sensation worldwide and the memoir about her perilous escape from North Korea, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom, has recently been published in 20 languages and 18 countries.

At the 2014 Oslo Freedom Forum and the One Young World Summit in Dublin, she became an international phenomenon, delivering a passionate and deeply personal speech about the brutality and repression of the North Korean regime. Her escape from North Korea has given the world a window into the lives of its people, and due to her bravery, strength, and story, the BBC has named her one of their “Top 100 Global Women.”

Ms. Park has been featured on CNN, CNBC, BBC, Fox News Network, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and Aljazeera, as well as in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph, Wired Magazine, The Daily Mail, Reuters, The Guardian, Yahoo News, National Review, Business Insider, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Vice News, Daily Life and The Verge.

Vernon L. Smith was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his pioneering work in experimental economics and the economics of entrepreneurial discovery and innovation. Professor of Law and Director of the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association; a Member of the National Academy of Sciences; a Fellow of the Econometric Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a Member of the Board of Advisors of the Independent Institute.

Dr. Smith has been a Ford Foundation Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He is past President of the Public Choice Society, Economic Science Association, Western Economic Association and Association for Private Enterprise Education. Previous faculty appointments have included the University of Arizona, Purdue University, Brown University, University of Massachusetts and George Mason University.

Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, he received CalTech’s distinguished alumni award, and he has authored or co-authored more than 250 articles and books on capital theory, finance, natural resource economics and experimental economics.