The Great Depression of the 1930s was so awful for so many Americans that it is often the yardstick against which we judge the severity of more recent economic troubles.
Fortunately, as any living American who went through the Depression can attest, we are not in economic problems of that magnitude today. But it was alarming to see a comparison between the housing bust of the past few years and housing figures from the Depression.
Recently released census figures show that U.S. home ownership fell last year to 65.1 percent. That was down from the peak a few years earlier of nearly 70 percent of homes that were owned by the people who lived in them.
That represented the biggest drop in home ownership since the Great Depression, The Associated Press reported.
The painful consequences of the housing bust are evident: Millions of Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure. And even those who have not lost their homes have lost a great deal of their equity, as the glut of foreclosed homes has driven down home values.
Moreover, vast numbers of homes are still in the foreclosure pipeline, which threatens to reduce home values even further in coming months and years.
What makes all this more heartbreaking for many of our people is that it was unnecessary.
The housing bust came about in large part because Washington pressured lenders to lower their lending standards to risky borrowers. Many borrowers were required to make only small or no down payments. And often the risky loans were given at adjustable rates, which soon began "adjusting" upward, putting the monthly mortgage payments out of the reach of many homeowners.
Those shaky lending practices were adopted in the name of "fairness" for people who would not otherwise have been able to get a mortgage -- or who would have qualified for a smaller mortgage -- if tougher standards were maintained.
But does anybody think it's "fair" that those very people have now lost their homes -- and their investment in those homes -- altogether? Wouldn't they, and our nation, have been better off if they had been given only as large a home loan as they could afford to repay?
Isn't the housing crisis one more sign that government meddling in the free market causes more problems than it solves?