Jaycee Woods

In light of a recent record Powerball jackpot, I had a story idea. It would be about a lottery winner who, instead of using his windfall on hookers and blow (aka hedonism), established a dynasty trust that allowed him to fund his family for generations.

This would contrast the historical choices of Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. The first still supports 170 beneficiaries while the latter fortune dissipated.

In part this is a case against inheritance taxes as a destruction of private capital. However, it would mostly be like a One Minute Manager style story about finance and legacy.

As a nod to Machiavelli, the working title for the story is “Fortuna and Virtù,” cuz that is how I roll.

The setting would be several generations in the future. A father brings his eldest son to the old family compound established by his great-grandmother, the daughter of the lottery winner. The trust beneficiaries are meeting there to decide the five-year appointment of the trustee.

The father teaches his son about the history of the family trust, how it created the seed money to establish dozens of successful family businesses, and how subsequent generations invested their own fortunes into the same trust to renew the legacy for their descendants.

Also he teaches his son about the establishment of the family compound and its continued role generations later in keeping the family together.

Fundamentally it is a coming-of-age story about a young man learning what it means to become worthy of one’s inheritance and its responsibility. In that it is a metaphor for our political inheritance as Americans and our failure as a polity to be morally worthy of what we inherited.

A much more hopeful story than my usual. Essentially, I took my own entertaining fantasy about how I would apply the lottery winnings and decided to make it a story. I think that I could retire comfortably on 5 basis points (aka five one-hundreths of one percent) annually of that lottery jackpot while reinvesting gains into the legacy trust principal.