Lenders & Borrowers (and I Hope Rick Santelli Gets a Case of the Ick)

Matt Yglesias echoes HERE what I wrote yesterday HERE; ie the bailout isn't necessarily just for "losers", "gamblers" and "cheaters" as much as for people that generally believed that the experts knew what they were doing at the time they were lending money.

There really is plenty of blame to go around here. But I just don’t see how more than a tiny fraction of it could possible adhere to our electrician or teacher or secretary who’s decided, basically, that the financial services professionals and government regulators know what they’re doing. Now could she have known better? Sure. She could have been reading Dean Baker and Paul Krugman and others. The idea that this lending was all being undertaken on a false premise that a nationwide housing bust was impossible wasn’t a highly guarded secret. I was, for example, familiar with the chart above and with the analysis suggesting that a bust was, in fact, likely. And I believed that analysis. But at the same time, I write about U.S. public policy debates for a living. If there’s a dissident line of thinking that, despite its general unpopularity, is popular among left-of-center economists—well, that’s the kind of thing I know a lot about. But our nurse? Why would she know?

And while I used the woman who had her hands and legs removed for an example, he uses iPhones:

And I just don’t think it’s the responsibility of individuals to know that all the experts, and all the conventional wisdom, are secretly wrong. All kinds of people have been buying iPhones because everyone says they’re great. And if this November, the iPhones all suddenly explode injuring tons of people, I think there’ll be a lot of blame to go around. But really just about none of that blame will land on iPhone owners—it would land on Apple and AT&T and regulators and gadget reviewers and everyone else. If not, if the people who run the country and its media don’t actually expect their pronouncements to be taken seriously, then really they ought to all quit and make way for people who take their responsibilities seriously.

So maybe instead of parroting jagoffs like Rick Santelli with whatever the a propos "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps like I did!!" mantra people wanna use to make themselves feel like cowboys on the wild frontier who are so brilliantly self-sufficient, someone can maybe look at the symptoms of what happened and see if all the "bad behavior" wasn't just on the borrower's end of things.