Who's fault is it anyway?

A couple people (probably the sum total readers of this blog) have asked me why I said that the lower income brackets are getting off while the upper class (the actual taxpayers) are picking up the bailout tab.
TPI made the astute argument that people who foreclose on their mortgages do not get any of the $700 billion bailout that Congress is debating. This is basically true. Although the people who are losing their homes will not receive direct compensation from the government in the bailout, they can in effect benefit. By restoring the liquidity of these mortgage giants, and with the enactment of recent legislation, mortgage companies can convert hi-risk mortgages into safer ones.

But the point I was trying to make was that if a doctor prescribes painkillers for me, and I get addicted to them because I take too many: I'm as much at fault as the doctor. To extend the analogy further, the doctor was perhaps at fault for not warning me sufficiently about the dangers of addiction, but he or she couldn't have known (because I was a first time painkiller user) that I would get addicted. Plus, the doctor knew I was in pain, and hospital beauracrats encouraged the doctor to prescribe painkillers to me.
Now the doctor is mired in a malpractice suit, and the only way he or she can continue to help patients is if his malpractice insurance bails him out.

The point I'm trying to convey here is that I have an excel sheet on my computer that tells me what my monthly payment will be for my (future) house, given a certain escrow, a fixed interest rate, and a certain down payment. This kind of simple calculation should be made by anyone buying a home, and people who see that data and yet make the decision to buy a house that exceeds their ability to make a payment are being very, very foolish. Further, although the banks that financed the mortgage were in fact being enablers to this foolish practice, they in themselves have no responsibility to stop people from buying houses beyond their ability to pay; all the banks see is a certain income level, a credit rating, and they make their decision based on that. Many people who defaulted on their mortgages failed to report other debts during their loan application process. Why should the bank care if they were carrying $15k in credit card debt? Maybe because the bank would have taken $15k off their mortgage amount.

Now I hate to advocate the bailout (since I'm highly against bailouts and government regulation in a free market) but accusing the banks of being evil entities who gave out bad mortgages knowing they would inevitably fail is an unfounded accusation. No financial entity gave away money to people who they believed couldn't pay it back. No financial entity intentionally lowered its liquidity so that when it's bad investments massively failed, it needed the government to bail itself out. The large companies that fell apart when the housing bubble burst were (in some cases) as victimized as the people who bought over-sized mortgages. I have (several times) shown the pressure Washington was putting on mortgage companies to finance people with less than perfect credit.

When will people grow up and stop expecting government to be their babysitter?