Pic of the Day

Bank vault door at Trinity Bar & Restaurant, New York City

I think I am finally getting a handle on what separates the rich from everyone else, and it's not this bank vault door. This door impresses the heck out of me. It's massive, it's elaborate, it is an amazing piece of mechanical engineering, and now it's just a prop in a trendy eatery. The thing is, a prop is all it ever was. Oh, I'm sure it did provide some security for whatever money the bank actually kept on hand. But how do you pay for a door like this? And the granite and marble palace in which it was held? You pay for it by making loans and charging interest. In order to pay for a door like this you need to be loaning vast sums of money, and they were. The expense of providing this door for their vault was like buying hubcaps for your Cadillac. That vault door might have cost a million dollars when it was new, but you can bet the bank was lending billions of dollars and collecting tens of millions of dollars interest. When you can get a million people all pulling together in the same direction you can pretty much go anywhere you want. No wonder politics is so contentious.