By now, you’ve probably heard (or heard of) Rick Santelli’s rant about the people who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford. And he is correct in the sense that they were part of the problem we’re now all suffering through, but they weren’t the source of the problem. Need we forget the heady years of the housing bubble, the insistence of the media, the banks, the predatory lenders, our friends and family, a big swell of peer pressure to buy a house? President Bush called in the ownership society. People made a lot of bad decisions during the housing bubble, but it wasn’t like the entire world wasn’t cheering them on.

Everyone was making bad decisions.

Tina and I almost made one of our own — a real estate agent and her friend at the bank kept telling us that every crummy overpriced house we looked at was a great deal. “If you don’t get into the market now, you’ll never get in!” she warned.

We opted not to buy and stay renters. Not bad, considering the quickly depreciating values of the homes we looked at not two years ago. I bring this up not to say that we’re somehow better than the people who did opt to buy, but that we were pressured to get a bad interest-only loan predicated on the notion that someday we would cash out the equity in our house and refinance. Tina and I are educated and, in regards to big expenditures, fairly cautious. Other people aren’t and they paid the price — and now we’re all paying for them. But it wasn’t like they were solely responsible for their mistakes. The financial and real estate industries are just as responsible as they are for offering them risky loans and promoting properties that people obviously couldn’t afford.

Santelli’s error is that everyone who participated in the bubble is at fault — not just the people who joined the “Ownership Society” when they couldn’t really afford to. Blaming the “losers” alone means shifting blame completely from the creators of the shell game.

I’ve always been skeptical that markets regulate themselves — I think it’s pretty clear that without regulation and a referee, markets work the way they were meant to: to get the people who run them stinking rich through any possible means. Greed often overrides common sense, and it certainly doesn’t regulate itself. Greed by its nature is selfish and reckless.

And it seems to me that the gatekeepers of the economy like Santelli still haven’t learned their lesson.