Greed merchants build museum honoring themselves

This story sounds fit for a TV series called 'Lifestyles Of The Rich And Egotistical'.

The giants of bottom-line tyranny have unveiled a brand spang-new museum in which they honor...themselves! For $8, folks can tour this shrine to greed, located only a block away from the New York Stock Exchange in the old Bank of New York digs. It's the only museum like this open to the public anywhere in the world.

Museum president Lee Kjelleren told Already Been Chewed, "Our purpose is to bring Wall Street to Main Street, and to show the importance and richness of our financial markets and promote a deeper understanding." The market is important, alright - as in self-important. The market economy is built on the backs of people like you and me. While visitors to the museum get to see such artifacts as a Ford Motor stock certificate signed by Henry Ford himself and a ticker tape from the 1929 market crash, the stock market in the post-Depression era is antithetical to the interests of the average American. Even in the 1920s before the Great Depression, the booming market failed to benefit large swaths of America that lived in poverty. (The '20s were like the '90s.)

For only $120,000, the museum's gift shop sells a sofa made out of shiny nickels. (As with those machines at Kings Island that flatten out pennies and etch Scooby-Doo on them, this falls under the exception to the law against intentionally rendering U.S. currency unusable.) You can also buy canceled stock shares from major corporations like America's Toilets & Testes to hang on the wall of your mansion.

Guests at the museum can also see a $10,000 bill and bars of gold! They can learn about the evolution of American currency and peep an interactive display of powerful CEO's telling of the founding of their companies.

This new museum opened at a cost of $9,000,000 - effectively expanding from a minuscule facility that existed previously - and shall cost $3,000,000 a year to run. Some of the revenue to defray the cost of this tribute to capitalist excess will be from visitors, but much of it'll come from renting out the museum space for the fanciest of weddings.

Why do I get the feeling this museum is kind of like the Creation Museum in my area? It's something that might be interesting, but only from the entertainment of it being unintentionally hilarious. It sounds like it would really be more of an amusement, and not something that I'd take seriously for educational purposes. While its stated purpose according to Lee Kjelleren is to "show the importance and richness of our financial markets", this sounds like its trying to promote a discredited idea - namely, the false notion that unfettered capitalism is good for the average person.

The market economy is the reason Americans work harder for less money. If you live near New York and want to give $8 of your hard-earned dough to the merchants of global greed, you could probably squeeze a few minutes in between working 70 hours a week to visit this self-congratulatory museum and be reminded of how little you have thanks to market vagaries.

(Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/BusinessTravel/story?id=4111101&page=1)