It has been four years since Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a misbegotten mess of 2,300 pages that spawned uncounted pages of new regulations. The regulations are uncounted since they’re still being written: Only 44% of those due from the Securities and Exchange Commission have been finished by this month, according to news reports.

Peter Wallison of AEI, the free-market think tank, points out that this isn’t just a huge burden on an economy still struggling to recover. It’s a wasted burden:

“None of this was necessary. The administration and Congress acted hastily. The Treasury Department sent draft legislation to Congress only a few months after taking office in 2009, and the law—spurred by a promise from then-Rep. Barney Frank for a ‘new New Deal’ — passed a year later. The left's view had been settled: the crisis would be blamed on Wall Street greed and insufficient regulation. The act set out to implement that worldview by subjecting American finance to unprecedented government control.

“It is now clear, however, that government housing policies — implemented primarily by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — forced a reduction in mortgage underwriting standards, which was the real cause of the crisis. The goal was to foster affordable housing for low-income and minority borrowers, but these loosened standards inevitably spread to the wider market, building an enormous housing bubble between 1997 and 2007.

“By 2008 roughly 58% of all U.S. mortgages — 32 million loans — were subprime or otherwise low quality. Of these 32 million loans, 76% were on the books of government agencies, primarily Fannie and Freddie, showing incontrovertibly where the demand for these loans originated. When the housing bubble burst, mortgage defaults soared to unprecedented levels. Although the left's narrative placed all blame on the private sector, these numbers show that private firms were responsible for less than a quarter of the problem.

“Yet Dodd-Frank said nothing about government housing policies and ignored Fannie and Freddie.”

Did you get that? More than three-fourths of subprime or low-quality mortgages were on the books of two giant government-sponsored enterprises. Those government-sponsored enterprises were untouched by the regulatory blob Congress passed in the wake of the crisis that they set off. The government was to blame, but the rest of America pays the price.