Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes is Latin. Its literal translation is "Who will guard the guards themselves?" but today it is commonly quoted as "Who will watch the watchers?"

The phrase originated with the Roman poet Juvenal in the context of marital infidelity.

I hear always the admonishment of my friends:
"Bolt her in, constrain her!"
But who will guard the guardians?

Plato introduced the phrase into a philosophical discussion of political corruption. Socrates took it a step farther, proposing a guardian class to protect society. Socrates' solution to the problem of ensuring the guardian's incorruptibility was to manipulate them via what has come to be known as "a noble lie."

We must tell the guardians a 'noble lie'. The noble lie will assure them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege; they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it.

The lowlifes running the IRS obviously are immune to a noble lie (although there is little doubt they are more than familiar with ignoble lies). It's bad enough that they have politicized the IRS, allowing it to be used as a tool to punish anyone who dares disagree with their political masters. But now they've gone so far as to pay bonuses to employees who owe the government back taxes.

The Internal Revenue Service handed out $2.8 million in bonuses to employees with disciplinary issues — including more than $1 million to employees who didn't pay their federal taxes, a watchdog report says.

The report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said 1,146 IRS employees received bonuses within a year of substantiated federal tax compliance problems.

The bonuses weren't just monetary. Employees with tax problems received a total of 10,582 hours of paid time off — valued at about $250,000 — and 69 received permanent raises through a step increase...

But wait! It gets worse. To fix the problem of giving bonuses to scofflaws "would require negotiations with the National Treasury Employees Union."

Does anyone out there seriously expect a union to do the right thing and agree that its members should be held to the same standards as us common folk?

This problem isn't limited to just IRS employees.

Non-payment of taxes by federal employees is a government-wide problem. The IRS says 311,536 federal employees were tax delinquents in 2011, owing a total of $3.5 billion.

So why are those deadbeats still employed by the government? Why can't we just fire their worthless asses if they won't pay their taxes?

Evidently it takes an act of congress to discipline tax deadbeats. And we all know that when congress gets involved things go from bad to worse.

Bills have been introduced in the House and Senate to fire federal employees with seriously delinquent taxes. The House bill, sponsored by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, failed to clear a procedural hurdle; the Senate bill by Sen. Tom Coburn is in committee.

GMAFB. Our do-nothing congresscritters can't even get together and agree that people who don't pay their taxes shouldn't be employed by the federal government? They damn sure don't have any problems hassling, harassing, and intimidating non-government employees.

Assholes one and all...