Megan McArdle’s blog posts remind me of the earthworms they gave us in 8th-grade biology: dissection is intuitively easy, even without helpful diagrams. To wit:  her latest entry in the blogosphere’s Blame-Go-Round on who bears the ultimate responsibility for our current housing fiasco.  Matthew Yglesias contends that the bankers, being bankers and spending all day doing all the banky-type things that bankers do, should have known better, and therefore bear the heavier burden of responsibility.

Megan, rising to the defense of the poor put-upon financier, responds thusly:

Are bankers somehow more aware than ordinary Americans that recessions happen, companies fold, people lose their jobs?

Are doctors somehow more aware than ordinary Americans that people get sick and die? Are pilots somehow more aware than ordinary Americans that planes occasionally plummet to the ground? One would hope the answer would be “yes”. If they aren’t then they’re either irresponsible or incompetent; it’s their business to be more aware of these things, to understand what causes these things, and to protect their patients/passengers as best they can.

Banks lend money. That’s why they exist. That’s how they stay in business. If they aren’t careful about the way they do business, they fail. To pretend for an instant that the average borrower off the street holds that same level of knowledge about finance — or should be expected to — is ridiculous.

People bear the responsibility for their actions. Borrowers should not have taken out loans they could not repay. But for the issuing agencies to loan $200,000 to someone with rotten credit making $30,000 a year — or loaning $200,000 without having any idea what the borrower makes or what their payment history is — is so irresponsible in so many ways that it defies description.

If I walked into a doctor’s office and said “Hey, Doc, I want to smoke two packs a day and drink a twelve-pack of beer a day for the rest of my life,” his response would not be to say “Hell, make it three packs and a case!” (I speak from experience.) If he did, I would be a fool in rapidly declining health, while he would be willfully negligent and in violation of the standards of his profession.

Those who issued junk loans were willfully negligent, caring only about short-term profitability. We could get into how the whole tawdry notion of “shareholder value” plays into this, but that’s a whole different post. And don’t even bring up this crap about how the banks were forced to lend to bad credit risks by the Community Reinvestment Act; that’s been debunked to hell and back already. No, sadly, there’s no governmental villainy behind the housing crisis. People just got greedy and stupid, especially the people whose very job it was to know better.

But that’s tough for libertarians like McArdle to swallow; in their world, money equals virtue, and it is far easier and more convenient to place the lion’s share of blame upon those who have committed the unpardonable sin of being poor.