Ali Auch is a chump.

Auch and her husband, both 22, are renting an apartment in Kiel while they work, go to college and raise a toddler. They looked at houses in their present price range but found them slummy. They could have bought way above their price range: When they lived in Green Bay last year, some lender prequalified them for a $220,000 mortgage, the payments on which would have exceeded their entire income. They said no.

The fools: See, they could have bought big, bet on the price rising and, when that didn't happen, hoped along with millions of other underwater borrowers for a federal rescue. The one Congress is thinking about would have lenders writing off principal, so houses get retroactively cheaper, while taxpayers would guarantee new loans so lenders evade their pain. It's a win-win for people who made deals the Auchs were prudent enough to avoid.

This bothered the Auchs enough that they signed an online petition at www.angryrenter.com. "Congress should not pass any bailout programs that reward risky borrowing and lending," reads the petition. "We're renting until we can afford to buy a house," reads the comment the Auchs added to their signature. "Why should we have to wait longer just so naive and unprepared buyers can get bailed out?"

The petition, which organizers say has 54,000 names so far, is being put together by FreedomWorks, a group that lobbies for lower taxes and less government. Coordinator Adam Brandon says opposing a bailout seemed natural, as the staff is mainly young and renting. A third of the country rents and so, obviously, is ineligible to be bailed out of a foolish mortgage - yet is entirely eligible to pay for it.

FreedomWorks is run by ex-congressman and old economics professor Dick Armey, who, some have noted, isn't an angry renter - he owns a nice house. Auch, however, certainly does rent, and if she isn't quite angry, she sounds vexed. Sure, people were lent money in deals they didn't understand, "but there seems to be an element of common sense missing," she says. If something sounds too good to be true and it's the biggest transaction of one's life, you'd think a little caution or legal advice was in order. That much is evident to a 22-year-old.

"I don't think it's the government's role to bail people out from such a huge mistake," she says.

Marjorie Miller doesn't rent, though she signed the petition. A surgeon in Wisconsin Rapids, Miller lives in a house she bought a few years ago for $180,000, a nice house. It's much more modest than the $500,000 houses an agent tried selling her. Burdened with student debt, she couldn't afford them, though brokers and lenders said she soon would be able to. "But that wasn't the point," she tells me. She wanted to buy within her means.

Miller immigrated from Haiti at age 5. "My mom worked three jobs and my dad worked one to buy their home," she said. "They bought what they could and didn't overextend themselves."

A woman she knows bought a $700,000 house in a posh Florida neighborhood on a nurse's salary, hoping to flip it. The house is now worth $300,000 and is on the brink of foreclosure. "She had no business buying a home at three-quarters of a million," Miller said, and the government has no business putting prudent buyers like Miller on the hook to bail out such foolishness.

Not to be unsympathetic to the roughly one out of every 1,200 Wisconsin households in foreclosure, but those good intentions behind a bailout - the effect a foreclosure has on the neighbors' values, the plight of naïve borrowers - all run into the fact that a bailout turns justice upside down.

Rage as you will about liars' loans and bankers' bonuses, what's still more outrageous is when we make it official public policy to punish the prudent and to help the profligate. It's grim that some people could lose their houses and have to rent for a while. It would be far worse if Big Mama Government swooped in to undo their mistake - with money taken from people who wanted to stop renting and never got the chance. This makes fools of responsible people like Auch.

Unless Congress grows a spine on her behalf. It's the injustice that most goaded Auch into signing the petition. "It just seems so wrong that these people made a wrong decision," she said, "and now they're crying for help and they seem to be getting it."

Patrick McIlheran is a Journal Sentinel editorial columnist