The fallacy with the Tea Party slogan "Your mortgage is not my problem" is that most people are not continually scheming to live beyond their means: they have to be introduced into structures and schemes larger than themselves that are constructed precisely to attain that end. To attribute the crisis to the profligacy of the average person presumes a level of understanding that is otherwise denied to the individual in the neoliberal era. As John Lanchester put it: "From the worm's-eye perspective which most of us inhabit, the general feeling about this new turn in the economic crisis is one of bewilderment . . . People feel they have very little economic or political agency, very little control over their own lives; during the boom times, nobody told them this was an unsustainable bubble until it was already too late."

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 352