As the woes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weigh on the stock market and the entire American economy, let us just say readers of The New York Sun are not surprised. We started raising the alarm more than six years ago, in an editorial headlined, “Housing Hazard,” which took President Bush to task for appearing in Atlanta alongside Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae and Leland Brendsel of Freddie Mac to announce $200 million in federal spending to help homebuyers with down payments. “Fannie and Freddie protest that they aren’t federally guaranteed, but any institutions that big with a name that begins with ‘federal’ — that’s what the ‘F’ in Fannie and Freddie stands for — are not going to fail without a taxpayer bailout,” we wrote then.

We followed up with an editorial expressing skepticism about Senator Schumer’s announcement of expanded availability of a Fannie Mae program that allowed families to make extremely low down payments — ranging from nothing to 3% — on the purchase of a home. “The ‘F’ in Fannie is for federal, and, though Fannie insists it’s independent, you can bet it’s the federal taxpayers who will be paying for an eventual bailout,” we wrote then, back in 2002.

We returned to the topic in an August 25, 2006, editorial, “Fannie and Justice.” “The problem is that because of their congressional charters, everyone assumes Congress would never allow Fannie or Freddie to fail. Thus, neither their creditors nor their shareholders pay enough attention to the amount of risk the pair take on,” we wrote. “Fannie and Freddie are a classic example of the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk. The risk to taxpayers will only go away once Fannie and Freddie are privatized, but lawmakers have stubbornly resisted even stepped-up regulation to limit the size of the companies’ portfolios, despite the fact that those portfolios enrich a few investors at the risk of all taxpayers.”

The problems date back to two men named Franklin Delano. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the president who created Fannie Mae in 1938. Its existence has now been so thoroughly taken for granted that the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page has been heroic in its battle with Fannie, published a news dispatch over the weekend claiming that Fannie’s “operations are vital to the functioning of the U.S. housing market.” Well, it occurs to us that there were houses in America, and that people owned and lived in them and bought and sold them, before 1938.

The second man is Franklin Delano Raines, who in April agreed to surrender $24.7 million of the $91 million in compensation he earned for serving as Fannie’s chief executive and chairman between 1998 and 2003 after a stint as director of the office of management and budget in the Clinton administration. As a Harvard student, Mr. Raines was a leader of the student strike in 1969; he eventually became chairman of Harvard’s board of overseers.

The Wall Street Journal has been calling for a federal bailout of Fannie and Freddie that at least would have the virtue of making the federal guarantee overt. That would come on the heels of the federal bailout of Bear Stearns, whose name doesn’t even begin with an “F.” This is all done under the rubric of assuring the stability of the overall financial system. It does, however, take money from taxpayers who rented apartments or paid cash to buy and kept their money in the bank or other, safer investments, and use the taxpayers’ money to subsidize Bear Stearns or J.P. Morgan Chase shareholders, or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders, and those who dealt in the secondary mortgage markets or who borrowed money at rates made lower by its existence.

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It strikes us as a fine topic for an open political debate. Fannie Mae has been lavishing campaign contributions, through its political action committee, on some of America’s most powerful politicians, including Senator Obama, who picked Fannie Mae’s former chairman, James Johnson, to run his vice presidential vetting process before dumping him. It gives Senator McCain an opportunity to show some free market bona fides by standing up against a bailout that would primarily benefit Washington special interests.

Yet, according to Bloomberg News, the Republican told reporters “there’s no doubt that there is a real significant, far-reaching problem that is going to have to very likely require some kind of government assistance … There’s no doubt that we can’t have these two institutions go under.” If they did the politicians might have to look elsewhere for contributions, and Americans might have to be credit-worthy enough to get their home loans without an implicit federal guarantee. It would not be the worst thing to return to a state in which mortgage loans are issued by banks themselves without any help from Fannie or Freddie.