Crisis is usually the best environment for leadership...

Likkerish wrote over on Digg.com:

Ron Paul is a LEADER in the classical (Jeffersonian) liberal tradition of our Founding Fathers.

"...crisis is usually the best environment for leadership." -- Alvaro Vargas Llosa, April 21, 2006, in an speech, "The State of Freedom: 2006."

Llosa ends his speech with the tale of an early Ron Paul by the name of Urukagina.

Around 2,400 B.C., a man known by the name of Urukagina led a people’s revolution against the oligarchic state in Lagash, one of the city-states of Sumer, in Mesopotamia, accusing special interests—court priests, administrators, the governor—of acting for their own benefit and either usurping the property of others or simply enslaving them. “The priest no longer invaded the garden of a humble man”, says the document that conveys his reforms and gave the human race the first recorded word for liberty: amagi (literally “a return to the mother,” referring to an idyllic past in which the gods wanted people to be free). He banned the authorities, both ecclesiastical and civil, from seizing property from commoners, did away with most of the tax collectors, curtailed the power of judges to rule in favor of oligarchs trying to exploit the weak, and got the government out of proceedings such as divorce.

Although Lagash thrived, Urukagina’s reign succumbed to a rival king after a decade. It stands as perhaps the first case of reform along classical liberal lines (to use a much more recent paradigm) and a very early example of struggle against collectivism, plunder and conquest. Something of the spirit of Urukagina, the first free-market reformer in recorded history, needs to impregnate the popular and intellectual discussion so that decision-makers can begin the process of “undoing” much of what has been done over the last few centuries.

The spirit of Urukagina has impregnated the Ron Paul Revolution!

Read more here.