Suckas!

If your parents were anything like ours, they reared you to be responsible people. That responsibility included picking up your toys, cleaning up any messes you may have made, admitting to and owning up to your mistakes and perhaps most importantly, being accountable to yourself and others for your actions.

Your parents are a bunch of saps.

Looks like Congress and a reluctant White House fearful of losing more seats to the Democrats if they are accused of “not doing anything” are getting closer on a housing mortgage bail-out deal.

You can read more of the gory details here, but the long and short of it and why the whole notion of bail-out frosts us is that money is coming out of the pockets of responsible home-owners to keep irresponsible people in their homes.

Now lest you think we are being too harsh, let's try a more clinically detached angle: the free-market was working just fine in flushing out those people that had no business being in the housing market in the first place. This subsidization of bad behavior both practically (by artificially lowering the “cost” of ownership) and psychologically (in way over your head? no worries – mulligan!) only promotes more bad behavior because the bad actors are being rewarded instead of being kicked to the curb as would happen naturally if the free market were allowed to do its thing.

It really does become a self-fulfilling prophecy: If we want to keep irresponsible people in the housing market AND encourage more irresponsible people to enter the market, then by damn, we certainly have the means.... your means to do so.

So…. are we off the cold, heartless bastard hook?