A Post Based On a Comment At Baselinescenario

This comment struck me as being so simple and yet so insightful I had to swipe it and put it here in its entirety.  I hope James Kwak, Professor Johnson and Mister "Norman Silber" don't mind.  It was made in reference to a post on Lending laws and the financial crisis.  The main post here, and the comment by "Norman Silber" copied word for word from here:

"One of my favorite scenes in the movie “My Cousin Vinny” occurs when Joe Pesci cross examines the storekeeper, who says it only took him a few minutes to cook his grits (so that he could return to a place where he could identify the defendants). Pesci asks whether the laws of nature were repealed in order to allow his grits to cook faster than all the other grits in the world.

I wonder if those arguing US consumers were equally culpable for getting into these bad loans truly believe that Canadian consumers were somehow possessed of a supernatural self-restraint that allowed them, unlike US consumers, to be spared of the human motivation to take loans that let them get into houses they wanted to buy. Or might it possibly have been better laws?"