Virtual Values

America Online ($26 billion) is worth about as much a ABC, CBS and NBC combined. Other Internet stocks are sizzling as well. In this reading, the apostle Paul speaks of changing values. What the pre-Christian Saul thought valuable, the Christian Paul regards as trash.

Consider this: The Internet company Yahoo, with an $8.2 billion market capitalization, is worth more than the New York Times Company, valued at $7.6 billion.

At $6.2 billion, Amazon.com is worth more than rival booksellers Barnes & Noble and Borders combined.

America Online, valued at $26 billion, is worth about as much as ABC, CBS and NBC put together.

A wag on the Internet recently wrote that traders had to be "free-basing St. John's Wort" to bid up these stocks so high. But there they are: Virtual Businesses worth an astonishing amount of Actual Bucks.

Are silicon and fiber the stuff of stock market magic? "So it appears," writes Rich Karlgaard in The Wall Street Journal. "They take gossamer wings of thought and brain power and speed and turn them into equity billions. At the same time, they transform many old bankable assets, like real estate and storefronts and inventory, into 'legacy problems' -- albatrosses of land and concrete and steel" (Rich Karlgaard, "The Web Is...