Barn-Building Fools

The architecture of the American barn that dots our rural landscape was often inspired by European design, which itself borrowed heavily from the cathedral template. With such a rich ecclesiastical tradition in its past, barn-building can't be bad, right?

We were shocked last year when A-Rod landed a $272 million contract to play baseball for the Texas Rangers. The salaries of professional athletes as a whole causes the average person to sputter in indignation

Congress has been debating the estate tax and has considered abolishing it. Yet Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and other obscenely rich people in America have urged that we keep it.


And the middle class? Accumulating more possessions than ever. One of the faster growing segments of the gross national product today is the storage business. Investors can't build these mini-storage, self-storage units fast enough. They provide safe, temperature-controlled environments in which to store our stuff for which we have no room at home. Americans are building bigger barns, and they frequently look like storage units.

Nothing wrong with that, unless we develop the barn-building syndrome that afflicted the landowner of today's text. Faced with increasing fortunes and possessions, the man pondered...