Any body empowered to watch others must itself be watched, and the regress has no natural end.
Juvenal's line, and the pre-modern statement of the principal-agent and oversight problems. Its point is the regress: every watchdog needs a watchdog, and no institution escapes it by design alone.
In practice
- A force that investigates its own complaints clears itself in most cases, and no individual finding is demonstrably wrong.
- An audit committee that reports to the executive it audits has moved the problem rather than solved it, and the regress does not terminate by design alone.
- Standing
- The pre-modern statement of the principal-agent and oversight problems.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Rules that restrain power, and advice on using it