WE DON'T ALL HAVE IT SO GOOD.(PERSPECTIVE)

Byline: MICHAEL OLESKER

NEW YORK -- At Madison and 36th, an old woman in a porkpie hat and sneakers slips a paper cup into an open taxicab window to beg for money. The cabbie shoves the cup back at her. Doesn't the old lady understand modern economics? These are boom times. Let her make her money in the stock market, like everybody else.

Across Madison, people spend $7 a head to walk through the wondrous J. Pierpont Morgan library. Their voices are hushed, as though entering church. In fact, it's a holy place of American capitalism, a storehouse of one man's quest for every snatch of culture that money could buy him: works by Rembrandt and Rubens and Seurat; …