Slipping into the swamp of moral hazard

My very own government is treating me as a sucker ... As some of my friends and neighbors seemed to prosper without end in reward for their doubling-down of high personal leverage and asset concentration, I began to wonder how to explain to my children why their dad was such a, well, loser. I kept telling myself that the once-a-generation correction (the same one that stung my grandparents in the 1930s, and my parents in the 1970s) would eventually validate my own choices as a reasonable personal strategy. Now I wonder. The net effect of these bailout activities is to reward the people who took wild risk and ignored generations of wisdom about debt and gambling. It leaves me trying to explain why I chose a higher-rate fixed mortgage and a modest house and modest consumer debt, with a higher proportion of my investment in low yield supposedly "safe" mutual funds.