Replies

So the question is:

How should one put one’s end of life “surplus” wealth to productive use over the millennia?

The Ford Foundation has gone rogue [or red, rouge].

It would seem that only things build of stone survive.

Who funded the Roman stone structures that survive today?

Intellectual Property like personal freedom? How to continue that? Hillsdale?

Yes, things like Hillsdale College, things like a financially and ethically sound business, apolitical charities that help change lives - like restoring a smile to little kids born with a cleft palette, personally helping advance a deserving young person, financially assisting in getting adoptions for babies that were saved from abortion, adopting kids that have lost or been abandoned by their parents and/or donating to organizations that support that, supporting young talent when they are also morally sound, and I could go on adding to the list.

Just think of everything in society like you do a child of your own, and how you try to invest in that child’s future materially and with morally sound ideas, and then extend that idea beyond your family to other folks in society. If someone had really great wealth they could even start another Hillsdale College, extending the availability of the kind of education Hillsdale tries to provide.

I could go on.

I don’t think that the Roman (or current) decadence was due to having the money for nice frescoes, or due to posthumous artistic endowments.

Due to having enough wealth to have ‘idle hands syndrome’, that’s another matter.

I won’t pretend to have the answers, but in terms of one’s own wealth, one could always try to establish the “Howard Family Trust”, or similar. Although I doubt it would come with the (ahem) benefits that Heinlien’s version did.

Seriously, unless you’re a Ford, or Carnegie, or some such, you’re not likely to make a dent in anything that might last more than a generation or two.

Ask today’s kids if they know who Danny Kaye is, or if they’ve seen one of his movies. I mean, who could forget ‘The Court Jester’?

A thousand years from now, if this world is still turning, it’s likely less than a dozen names from the 20th century will last, and none of us are going to make that list.

As for me, it’s probably a little late to worry about children for my ‘posterity’, so phooey. My goal is to spend it all (if possible) before I go, and if not, leave what’s left to friends and cousins who will hopefully carry a pleasant memory for a while at least.

Or alternatively, I could start accepting donations toward my proposed “FreepHenge”, the biggest Henge this side of the Meridian... :P

Institutions seem to follow a regular and virtually inevitable decay from their original purpose over time. Try to think of an institution more than a century or two old that you have full confidence and faith in their continuing their original mission an purpose.

With that in mind, I would try to minimize the amount of surplus wealth by deploying it for use while still alive. And that which is left should be left with people/institutions who will put it to good use sooner than later (perhaps even state this in the bequest), so that 50 years down the line it’s not funding some “charity” gone rogue and doing the exact opposite of what you intended.