On Monday, I wrote about the nascent recession's origins in the housing bubble. Today I'm going to write about what the government can do about the foreclosure crisis, which is rapidly becoming an important election issue. But first I'm going to make a comment that is both incredibly tacky and unfortunately true: A housing bust, even one with foreclosures, won't be bad for everyone.

Breathe.

In a culture that treats business news like sports — who's winning and how? — we've come to see rising real estate values as good news. But while that's true for some of the people some of the time, it's simply not true for all of the people all of the time. A decline in home prices is bad for homeowners, but it's good news for anyone who doesn't own a house and wants to buy one. As real estate prices fall, the American Dream gets more attainable — and that affects the people who need help most.

Whatever the government does to forestall foreclosures shouldn't have the side effect of holding up house prices, which are overvalued by almost any historical measure — in part because the government looked the other way as a bubble inflated. It also shouldn't protect people from the results of their own reckless speculation — provided that they knew what they were getting into.

Home buyers who didn't understand the loan they were taking out should get relief — which should come at the expense of the lenders who defrauded them. But those who simply took an unwise risk should live with the consequences. Anyone who thought it was a good idea to take out a loan named after a staple of karate movies — the infamous NINJA loan stands for No Income, No Job or Assets — should probably stick with renting, anyway.

The government needs to find a way to prevent abandoned houses from becoming crack dens — ideally by taking the money from fraudulent lenders rather than taxpayers. And it should provide bridge loans to those who are close to paying their mortgages. But protecting people who can't come close to paying for the house they're in will simply encourage them to take more chances. And that's how we got into this mess in the first place: Banks made stupid loans because they knew the government would bail them out. By helping them, the government would in effect be punishing people who bought a smaller house that they could afford. That's why there's so much resentment about a mortgage bailout.

An article in Slate goes so far as to say that foreclosures will help as many people as they hurt, which is hard-hearted but might also be true. (Although the dislocation of foreclosures would hurt the overall economy.) Then again, our view of foreclosure as a tragedy is based partly on the idea that a homeowner loses a significant down payment along with his or her home. Some of today's homeowners barely made down payments at all. Assuming they knew what they were getting into — which, granted, could be quite an assumption — why should the government help them any more than renters?