At a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School last week, former IRS chief counsel Donald Korb was asked, "On a scale of 1-10 ... how damaging is the current IRS scandal?"



His answer: 9.5. Other tax experts on the panel called it "awful," and said that it has done "tremendous damage."



I think that's right. And I think that the damage extends well beyond the Internal Revenue Service. In fact, I think that the government agency suffering the most damage isn't the IRS, but the National Security Agency. Because the NSA, even more than the IRS, depends on public trust. And now that the IRS has been revealed to be a political weapon, it's much harder for people to have faith in the NSA.

Instapundit correctly notes that the current IRS scandal has tremendous implications for the NSA and other misbehaving government agencies:What we are witnessing is the ongoing self-delegitimization of the US federal government. It is impossible to pretend any longer that there is a rule of law in the USA. It is impossible to pretend any longer that the government is the servant of the people. Like the fire to which George Washington compared it, the dangerous servant has become the fearful master.This is why the American people are arming at a rate that has never been seen before. They are not afraid of crime. They are afraid of their government. On some inarticulate level of consciousness, they are aware of this: an unreasonable, ineloquent master who knows only the use of intimidation and force is bound to resort to the latter when the former fails.The conspiracy theoreticians were correct, on the whole. There is an active conspiracy and it is a conspiracy against the American people by some of the 2.79 million people who are employed by the US government.

Labels: conspiracy, decline and fall