For anyone with a pulse who was living in the US for the last two weeks, Congress' failure to pass a bailout proposal on Monday wasn't that surprising.

It's virtually impossible to live here and not hear about the “financial crisis” that has best our country.

What is perhaps most unfortunate about this situation is that it provides for the most offensive sort of posturing by precisely those politicians at whose feet the lion’s share of the responsibility for our troubles rests.

I am an avid fan of the great Austrian economist and Nobel Laureate Prize winner, F.A. Hayek, and there are few scholars who have influenced my thinking to the extent that the economist Thomas Sowell has. Sowell especially has the rare ability -- a gift, really -- of making intelligible for the lay person economic concepts and principles that would otherwise remain within the province of a relatively small handful of specialists. Yet, in spite of my familiarity with the work of some economists, I can’t pretend to have genuinely studied economics, and so I do not pretend to speak with the authority of an “expert” on the issue(s) that we currently face as a nation.

However, from what I have been able to discern, the “crisis” in which we find ourselves is, fundamentally, a government-induced phenomenon. That “greed” has played a role -- a significant, predominant role -- in it is undeniable. But this greed isn’t unique to “Wall Street.” Politicians, both Democratic and Republican, were consumed with greed as well, a lust for power, and it was their greed for power off of which the greed of the “movers” and “shakers” of “Wall Street” fed.

From as far back as the late 1970s, and in an effort to increase the rate of minority home ownership, the government has brought tremendous pressure to bear upon lending institutions in the private sector to approve mortgages for applicants who under traditional criteria wouldn’t have stood a snowball’s chance in hell of being approved. Under threat of penalty, or promise of reward, private lenders were essentially coerced into making “sub-prime,” high risk loans to those who showed no reasonable prospect of fulfilling their terms.

Greedy, irresponsible politicians abused the power with which they had been entrusted and interfered in the free market for the sake of advancing, first and foremost, their own selfish ends. In exchange for backing the high risk loans that they had been pressured into making, lobbyists on behalf of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae greased the campaign coffers of politicians like Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd and Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

There are still others whose greed contributed greatly to this problem but, largely because politicians need their votes, they have been made out to be victims. I refer to the millions of Americans whose greed motivated them to take out loans that they should have known they wouldn’t be able to repay.

So yes, when Republican presidential nominee John McCain, Obama, Dodd and most other politicians who either actively encouraged the government’s coercive efforts to engineer the mortgage industry or implicitly supported them through silence attribute this crisis to “Wall Street greed,” they are partially correct. But there are two other aspects of this story that need to be stated and underscored.

First, it wasn’t only “Wall Street” bankers who exhibited greed throughout all of this. Those Americans who, as I mentioned, engaged in risky, irresponsible, greedy conduct in taking out loans that they couldn’t repay, and for which the rest of us are paying the price right now, bear a share of the responsibility, as do the politicians who showed monumental greed in encouraging them to do so in exchange for the prospect of additional votes.

Second, it was the greed of politicians, not corporate executive officers and individual home buyers that gave rise to this crisis by fueling the greed of everyone else.

Notwithstanding the assertions to the contrary from Obama and McCain, it isn’t a lack of “oversight,” or “deregulation,” or a “failure of the market” that accounts for this crisis.

It is a failure of government agents to control their own greed by keeping their hands off of the financial markets.