Be sure to read this from the NYT:

in a nation that holds itself up as a citadel of free enterprise, the government has transformed from a reliable guarantor into effectively the only lender for millions of Americans engaged in the largest transactions of their lives.

Before, its more modest mission was to make more loans available at lower rates. Now it is to make sure loans are made at all. The government is setting the terms and the standards of Americans’ biggest loans.

[...] The new reality is scorned by libertarians and conservatives, who fear state intrusions on the market, and by populists and progressives, who dislike the idea of education and housing increasingly resting upon the government’s willingness to finance it.

“If you’re a socialist, you should be happy,” said Michael Lind, a fellow at the New America Foundation, a research institute in Washington. “But you should really wonder whether you want people’s ability to pay for housing and college dependent on the motives of people in Washington.”

That’s about as plainly stated as I’ve seen it. When it shows up thus in the New York Times, it must be bad. Still…seems like a pretty broad anti-socialist consensus, right? But all the parties involved remain caught in the grip of spending. Sacred cows must be gored. And if we don’t want to start by limiting home ownership and college attendance — since rolling these things back now seem inconceivable — we may just have to start with massive health-related spending and then the defense budget. Hard cheese, as the English say. But ask yourself, as you wend your way through this ugly and foreboding garden: what is the alternative? We always imagined that American intervention abroad could spiral out of control. At a time of crumbling infrastructure and bureaucratic incompetence, how could it be that it’s snapped its moorings at home, too?