Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.

The natural enemy of a rational social order appears to be the shrimp cocktail, or the bacon-wrapped shrimp. Stick with me, while I attempt to explain how the corrupt desire to be invited to all of the "right" cocktail parties undermines and threatens the most admirable and fundamental philosophical achievements of the libertarian movement.

I have always loved seeing people get ahold of some corner of an otherwise slippery universe and hang on. An example of that would be the ratio pi, which features so highly in the fabric of reality. Or for that matter, creating the entire body of something like plane geometry from a couple of axioms and some applied skull-sweat. Or consider the mechanical design of a Remington rolling block rifle, which uses nature against itself, only locking at the precise moment it fires. I was taken at the time by how succinct and tidy Ayn Rand's insistence was that nobody had a right (not just proclaiming that that it is "wrong") to initiate force or the threat of force against another individual. It solved practically every problem of human interaction.