Who is to blame for the mortgage crisis?

I wonder if the people who keep talking about how people took out mortgages on homes they couldn't afford ever considered why those people couldn't afford them?

It's not like the vast majority these people were buying mansions. When you consider that in California, a 60 year old cracked-up stucco track house averaged a cool million until recently, maybe it makes more sense to question the cause of the artificially inflated house prices.

Ron Paul is right in the notion that the answer may be to let it all crash. Let the housing prices fall back to what they should be. Actually, despite bail-outs, I believe it will happen.

When it takes two upper-middle class incomes and creative financing to purchase a mortgage on a home that was built in the 1950s to accommodate families living on a single low military salary, there's something fundamentally wrong.

A lot of people got "rich" during the tech boom. But, isn't it ironic that the result was that they ended up spending the majority of their wealth to simply maintain the standard of living that their lower-middle- class, one income, parents and grandparents enjoyed.

Regardless of what happens with backs and auto manufacturers, the one thing that cannot be "fixed" is the rapid depreciation of housing prices. That leaves the majority of the home owners in Northern California upside down on their mortgages. But the housing bubble had to break at some point.

So again let it crash. But instead of bailing out the banks, bail out the homeowners that are stuck with a million dollar mortgage on a $70,000 dollar house. Someone has to live in these homes, and regardless of the turn in the economy, I guarantee you that they won't be inhabited by wealthy people.

I believe this is a natural correction in a housing market that went terribly wrong. The point is to figure out how to avoid getting into this mess again.