[mrami]

This isn't exactly a rebuttal, but how much are housing prices inflated by the fact that everybody's getting loans? How much would those $300k houses be worth without the mortgage industry? It seems to me that the housing market is caught in a self-reinforcing cycle where mortgages inflate prices, and now nobody can get on the treadmill. That doesn't seem like a unassailably good thing, or something that should just be accepted as "the way it is." (It may be the best of all possible worlds, but I've seen no evidence of that personally.)