For Warren County, where there are about 18,000 homes, a real estate firm specializing in foreclosed properties listed 13 for sale in August. The most expensive was $108,000. The least was $27,000.

Further, according to RealtyTrac, Mississippi was the fifth-best state to call home that month. Statewide, for every 5,238 people making mortgage payments, only one was so far behind that legal action was being taken to cancel his or her loan.

The real estate folks, quite naturally, eschew all the crisis talk. Their business prospers from stable, slowly expanding homeownership that edges prices up with demand. Their business suffers unless people are actively buying and selling.

Figures tend to back them up. While vast areas of California and more opulent areas of Arizona, Nevada and Florida are seeing foreclosure rates as high as 1 per 200 homes, it could be because housing in those areas got so stupidly expensive. Elsewhere across America, the pinch might be stronger than in years past — but a nationwide meltdown? Why?

All this points to a problem for thinking people. Everybody wants to know what caused today’s mess. It’s hard to accept the “combination of factors” rhetoric. The search is on for a lone culprit. In Washington and on TV and the campaign trail, finger-pointing is the name of the game.

There are some “undeniables:”

• Government is not just now getting into the housing market.

For one thing, government-backed loans have long existed for veterans and for farmers. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “independent” in the same way the U.S. Postal Service is “not a government agency.”

For another, starting during the Carter Administration and continuing since, Congress has, via the Community Reinvestment Act and myriad other programs, increasingly pressured truly private banks to take on more risk. Translated, that means making loans  without nearly as much collateral or proof of ability to repay as the bank, left on its own, might have deemed acceptable.

• Today’s markets are not a Republican or a Democratic invention.

As Democrats tell it, Republicans favored tons of “deregulation,” resulting in too little oversight that allowed hedge fund and derivative financiers to go buck naked wild. There’s some truth to that.

As Republicans tell it, the principals in Fannie and Freddie — and many other rats who left Wall Street with tens of millions — were Democratic operatives — incompetents who cashed in on their contacts. They list Franklin Raines, who was President Clinton’s budget director and left with $50 million, Jamie Gorelick of Clinton’s Justice Department, who left with $26 million, and Jim Johnson, who served on Barack Obama’s vice presidential search committee while making millions as Fannie Mae CEO.

While much is made of the fact that Obama — at $126,000 — is No. 2 on the Fannie and Freddie donee list, he was far from only benefactor. A tally shows people now serving in Congress have received a total of $4.8 million, with 57 percent going to Democrats and 43 percent to Republicans.

•Greed trumped other considerations.

Indeed, one of the things that sent housing prices through the roof in the states now dealing with more foreclosures than Mississippi was people intent on making as much money as they could as fast as they could. In many ways, the housing market has been played as an old-fashioned pyramid scheme.

Remember those miracle cookies from the 1980s?  Homemakers could buy a few boxes cheap and sell at a profit, then become a distributor by signing up more sellers and profiting from their sales, too — then continuing to get a cut as the new sellers became distributors. On and on.

As long as the cookies are selling, such systems work. But when the sales stop, so does the churn of money to those at the top of the pile.

Same thing, but this time it’s the entire economy of the United States and much of the world that has been put at risk of collapse.

• There’s not an instant Republican or Democratic cure.

The persistent “gotcha” games played by politicians and egged on by the national media are a constant and harmful diversion. Conflict sells on TV or there would be fewer, not more, shouter shows. It’s cheap and easy journalism to couch everything in terms of winners and losers. The only problem is that no one is left to mind the store.

Name the topic — education, health care or, as here, the national economy. Who will read a neutral analysis or listen to a measured description of problems and solutions when Larry and Jill are at each other’s throats over on Channel 45?

So a final truth is that we’ve all been distracted.  And a big price is to be paid for not paying attention.