ABSTRACT
Law is not merely negative, removing opportunities for virtue; it is often positively evil, substituting a bad motive for a good one, and since the moral value of an action lies entirely in the motive the theory of Rousseau that, through law, the State ‘sides with’ the author moral self is everywhere and entirely false. Many doctors who resisted and attacked the Health Insurance Act when it was first proposed and who worked its provisions in a spirit of hostile and grudging acquiescence, would now admit that they were quickly convinced that the results were wholly good, and that they now carry out those regulations with no more feeling of enslavement than they have towards their stethoscopes or their ‘Quain’ or any other tried and trusted tool of their trade. It is only a genius for vicarious slavery that enables a man to develop the individualist case.
