Klein, Clark, and the Liberty Maxim

From the paper:

Better to have ninety-something percent principles that help us than only principles purportedly 100 percent that either fiddle with definitions in opportunistic ways or imply madness (we have encountered libertarians who have said that they would not murder an innocent person even if the survival of humanity depended on it!).

How does the given example suggest madness? Would it be mad to prefer to die oneself rather than murder an innocent?

How many people would the authors be willing to personally rape, torture and murder to preserve humanity? Whatever number it takes?

I don't see what's mad in preferring not to murder.

Kind of a philosophically incoherent paper. They just take something from Rothbard and apply it to Smith, tacitly assuming that utilitarianism is scientifically defensible (which it isn't even in a Hayekian classical liberal setting).

They also seem to have no clear notion what the government is, sentences like "the taboos are usually partly the result of government restrictions, as with sex and drugs", beg the question: Who is this entity called the government, going around and impressing taboos on innocent victims? Seems like the government in this meaning is something very different from the government that people use to protect the environment.