Coach Calipari Gets an “A” for Accountability

By Theresa Camoriano

In an interview immediately after winning a close game against Vanderbilt, University of Kentucky coach John Calipari said he had made a big, stupid mistake when he called a time-out in the last few seconds of the game.  Wow!  An admission of a mistake!  Accountability!  What a breath of fresh air when most people are busy pointing fingers at everyone else and trying to duck responsibility.  While many people think sports should not be part of a university education, I would like to suggest that we could learn more valuable life lessons from college sports than from the vast majority of college courses.  If we learn from Coach Cal’s example to be self-critical and accountable and to take responsibility for our actions, then both we and our society will be much better off.

The pollster Frank Luntz (in his recent book What Americans Really Want) tells us that Americans are craving accountability from private businesses, from politicians – essentially from everyone. Thomas Sowell (in his latest book Intellectuals and Society) explains how intellectuals are undermining our values and destroying our society largely due to their lack of accountability for the whacky ideas they produce.  (I highly recommend both of those books.)  So, if accountability from Coach Calipari and others is so attractive and is what people really want and need, then why do we get so little of it, and how do we go about getting more?

Part of the problem is that many people refuse to face reality, which is where accountability would be found.  Unfortunately, they buy into nice-sounding theories and then filter out reality in order to support their theories, but, if you don’t face reality, you won’t get accountability.

For example, someone recently sent me an article saying, if we want accountability in health care, we should put the government in charge rather than private businesses, because the government is “accountable to the people”, while corporations are only “accountable to their shareholders.”  Doesn’t that theory sound nice?  Being accountable to “the people” sounds much better than just being accountable to “shareholders”, and it might even persuade someone who got straight A’s in all his college courses while never going to a basketball game, but people who live in the real world and face reality know better.  The fact is that being accountable to “the people” or to “everybody” means that you are essentially accountable to nobody, while being accountable to shareholders or to the owner of a business means real accountability.

Have you ever actually tried to hold anyone in the government accountable for anything?  How did that work out for you?  The fact is, in the real world, it is virtually impossible to hold the government accountable for anything.  By contrast, private businesses are routinely held accountable in a variety of ways, such as by going out of business if they do not do a good job of serving their customers, since customers have choices about where they spend their money (as opposed to taxpayers, who are forced to hand over their money to the government whether they like the service or not).

We cannot sue government employees who fail to do their jobs, because they are protected by sovereign immunity.  Nor is government usually held accountable for its wrong-headed and even fraudulent policies.  For example, the government regulators who pressured banks to make unsound mortgage loans to people who couldn’t afford them, based on a policy of promoting home ownership, have not been held accountable for the mortgage meltdown they caused.  Instead, the government folks are pointing the finger at the banks and are using the results of their own misuse of power as a basis for demanding still more power to regulate those evil, greedy banks.  (Do you really believe the greedy bankers would have made loans on purpose to people who could not pay them back unless they were pressured by the government regulators to make them?)

Is anyone in the government being held accountable for the bankrupt Ponzi scheme that is Social Security?  How about the bankrupt scheme called Medicare?  Bernie Madoff will spend the rest of his life in prison for his fraudulent investment scheme, but he didn’t force anyone to invest in it.  Government forces us to “invest” in its unsound schemes, resulting in bankrupt programs that will not be able to pay out to the “investors” as promised, but nobody from the government goes to jail for that.

If we really want accountability, then we need to put the decision-making power in the hands of the people who bear the cost of the decision.  For example, Coach Calipari knows he will lose his job if his team does not perform well over the long haul, so it is appropriate that he should be the person making the decisions.  He has a far greater incentive to be self-critical and to make good decisions than is someone else who does not personally bear the real cost.

If power is shifted to politicians, government bureaucrats, and other people who do not bear the cost of the decisions, then we should expect that many more bad decisions will be made.  Sowell emphasizes that point in Intellectuals and Society.

We all know that a consumer who is spending his own money is much more likely to spend it wisely (with more accountability) than is a politician or bureaucrat who is spending other people’s money.  A school that relies on parents voluntarily paying tuition is much more accountable to those parents than a school that relies on tax revenue, because the voluntary payments are likely to stop if the school does not perform well, while the tax money will continue to flow in regardless of performance.  Similarly, a patient who is spending his own money for a medical test or treatment is much more likely to make sure there is a good reason for getting that test or treatment and to be sure the price is fair than is someone whose tests and treatments are purchased by a third party, such as an insurance company.

When the same people who consume the services also are responsible for paying for those services, then the consumers can judge whether they really want to buy the services and whether they are getting a reasonable deal.  They have the power to vote with their feet and with their wallets, thereby holding providers accountable.

While it may seem difficult to create a system that would provide such accountability, in fact we are very fortunate that we already have such a system, which has been tested and proven to work very well in the real world for hundreds of years.  It is called “free market capitalism”.  Unfortunately, there are many people who focus on the flaws of the free market (as if there is any human institution that is perfect) and seek to undermine and destroy it in order to try to get rid of those flaws.  But destroying the best system for providing real accountability that we have ever known has been tried many times, and it never results in an improvement.  The “cure” is invariably much worse than the “disease”.

Fortunately, most Americans are still very practical people who face the real world every day.  They know that perfection is not an option, and the free market and freedom work best.  Now, if we could just start getting our freedoms, individual responsibility and accountability back from the government that has gradually been taking them away, then I am confident that this country’s future would indeed be bright. (But don’t ask me what happened to Kentucky in its game with Tennessee!)