Auditing Our Auditors

The Roman satirist Juvenal, in a famous passage, asked, “Who will watch the watchmen?”

That problem of policing the police has troubled Western thinkers from Plato to the American Founders.

The framers of the Constitution set in place a brilliant series of legislative, executive, and judicial checks and balances to thwart the abuse of power by the powerful. Their pessimistic take on human nature was that all power corrupts. Inevitably, elites will insist that they should not be subject to the very rules they enforce on others.

The sexual abuse crises within the contemporary Catholic Church arose from the de facto exemptions from the law given to priests. Too many assumed that men of faith were exempt from prosecution because as holy men they would be the last to violate the trust of minors.

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