The Fortune magazine editor at large asks the question that we should all be asking, “Why does Wall Street always get bailed out?“

His answer is I think in some ways inadequate. It’s more than protecting the financial system. After all, if it were just about that, some of the people behind this debacle would be kicked off Wall Street for life.

It’s about the fact that central bankers feel a need to protect “people like us”.

The subprime-mortgage-market meltdown is a classic example of the way small fry get devoured, but the whales of Wall Street get rescued. Here’s the deal: People with crummy credit who took out mortgages are being allowed to fail in record numbers. The mortgage companies that made those loans are being allowed to fail.

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But the world’s central banks aren’t letting the big guys fail. Think of it as the Escape of the Enablers. The reason this is happening, of course, is the same reason that the Fed orchestrated a bailout of the infamous Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund a decade ago-and about 20 years ago didn’t close some of the nation’s biggest banks, even though they were effectively insolvent because unrealized losses had wiped out their capital.

It’s the “too big to fail” syndrome. In a world in which big players make incredibly large and complex deals with one another – that’s what derivatives are – regulators don’t dare let a big or important institution fail for fear that the collapse of one would lead to “cascading failures,” and other institutions wouldn’t be able to collect what the collapsed institution owed them.

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Sure, we know that Ben and the boys will always bail out the biggies. And none of us – I think, anyway – wants the world’s financial system to implode. But I’d feel a lot better if the Street had to pay a serious price to its rescuers–say, having to fork over a big equity stake and pay a loan-shark interest rate. That way taxpayers, who are picking up the tab for the rescue, would get paid bigtime for taking on bigtime risk.