There was a story in the Wall Street Journal last Thursday entitled Money Makeover: $100 Bill Gets a Facelift to Fight Fakes. Obviously it is about the redesign or the $100 bill in an effort to avoid counterfeiting. I got started thinking about the idea of fakes as I read.

What makes something a fake? When it comes to a great painting, the answer if obvious. If it was not painted by Picasso and is singed by Picasso, then it is a "fake." A fake is something that represents something that it is clearly not or that it doesn't have the necessary backing to lay claim to in order to support its genuineness.

If Picasso didn't paint it, and someone represents a painting as being painted by his hand, then that is fraud, for the painting is a fake.

Now, the dealer may point out that although the painting was not actually painted by Picasso, it is a very close approximation, and every bit as beautiful as an original or that it was painted by a pupil of Picasso. He may be correct about the beauty of a certain work. It may look just like a Picasso and even be seen by many as being "just as good" as a Picasso.

Still, it will never be a "real" Picasso and the price someone will pay for it will reflect this.

When someone buys a Picasso, they are not paying for the look, they are paying for the name, the backing, the history, all the intangibles that to the logical thinker shouldn't matter, and yet they do.

My line of reasoning and where I am going with all this is probably obvious to many of you by now...What makes a $100 bill manufactured in my basement a fake when compared to one manufactured in the Federal Reserve's basement? The only difference, at this point in history, appears to be that they who manufacture it, have have guns and authority to say so.

But that's no different than those same people with guns and authority forcing me to buy a Picasso copy for the price of a real Picasso. I'm not doing what I want to do in such a situation or what makes sense to me, only what I am being forced to do. I might not necessarily see it that way. But that makes no real difference, does it?

Habit can make non-reasoning automatons of us all in time. We live in a world of fakes. Indeed, we've grown accustomed to it. We eat fake food. We watch fake doctors working in fake hospitals on fake T.V. shows. We dream fake dreams about fake lives of fake wholesomeness and how fake love affairs could make us all so genuinely happy.

Very strange.

Perhaps its time to start thinking about real things. Bull