The Wealth We Build Together

There is a form of wealth you notice most clearly when it stops working.

The tap produces clean water. A road connects the town to the hospital. A library gives you somewhere to read without buying a coffee first. A school opens its doors. You do not receive a personal asset statement for these things, but their availability changes what your income can do.

If each household had to replace every shared function privately, the bill would be a different bill. Some people could pay it. Others would go without. This is one reason a discussion of prosperity becomes too small when it looks only at the money held inside individual accounts.

Personal resources matter. Shared resources matter too. The aim should be to make them reinforce each other, so that a person’s earnings can support a wider life rather than repeatedly purchase substitutes for missing common provision.

We need to become good owners of the things we build together.

A fund that belongs to a public

Norway provides an instructive example, though not a ready-made solution for the United States. Its Government Pension Fund Global receives the state’s net petroleum cash flow, and transfers from the fund to the government budget require parliamentary decisions. The fiscal guideline says withdrawals should follow the expected real return over time, currently estimated at 3 percent. It allows attention to economic conditions and smoothing across years.¹

The phrase over time is doing real work. Three percent is not a guaranteed annual investment return or a rigid ceiling that describes every year’s withdrawal. Nor does the fund give every resident an individually withdrawable account. It is collectively held public wealth operating through a fiscal and governance framework.

That framework separates responsibilities. Parliament establishes the legal framework; the Ministry of Finance has overall responsibility and sets management guidelines; Norges Bank is tasked with management, with operational management delegated to Norges Bank Investment Management.²

None of those arrangements makes investment risk disappear. Their relevance is institutional. A resource windfall can be converted into an asset intended to benefit a public over time, with rules about who may manage it and how it connects to the budget.

The lesson is larger than petroleum, but it must not float free of petroleum. Norway’s particular resource endowment, scale, history, and institutions matter. The United States cannot acquire the same position by copying the name of the fund. A country without an equivalent revenue source has to identify how assets would actually be accumulated and what current claims would finance them.

Still, the example breaks a habit of thought. Public wealth does not have to be treated only as something to sell or a revenue stream to spend immediately. It can be something to preserve, govern, and use across generations.

The public is capable of having a balance sheet as well as a bill.

A fee is a policy choice too

A separate Norwegian example brings the discussion closer to the household. Statistics Norway’s January 2026 kindergarten report describes a maximum monthly parental fee of NOK 1,200, or NOK 700 in the least central municipalities. The rules cover public and private kindergartens. Food and other charges can be additional.³

These figures are not a ready-made comparison with an American family’s total child-care bill. Hours, ages, eligibility, taxes, wages, and purchasing power would need to be aligned before making that comparison. Nor should the fee ceiling be confused with the full resource cost of providing the service.

What the example demonstrates is a deliberate choice about which part of that cost should arrive at the household as a bill. That is a different question from whether the service costs money to provide. It certainly does. Workers must be paid, buildings maintained, and quality protected. The policy question is how the financing is shared and what access the arrangement makes possible.

A familiar objection asks why someone without children should contribute. It is a reasonable question if it is asked sincerely. Public provision requires reasons that reach beyond the immediate user. My answer begins with the kind of society we want to inhabit: one in which raising children does not exclude ordinary people from work or learning, and in which children have access to reliable care. Others may add different reasons. We should debate the contribution openly.

People also use shared services at different stages of life. A fair system need not return exactly the same amount to every person in every year. It should have a defensible account of contributions, benefits, and obligations across time, while protecting those whose lives follow less common paths.

The mistake is to describe the household’s private bill as natural and every alternative financing arrangement as artificial. Both are arrangements. Both distribute burdens.

The service is part of the return

A public asset can benefit people through revenue. It can also benefit them through use.

A well-maintained water system does something before it pays a dividend. A dependable transit route may make a job reachable. A public educational institution may make study possible at a price and location a private alternative would not offer. The important question is what the asset enables and whether it continues doing that work over its life.

This requires a broader account of maintenance. A government can announce a building and then fail to provide the people, equipment, and upkeep that make it useful. The photograph lasts longer than the service. I would rather have a less impressive opening ceremony and a reliable institution ten years later.

The same standard should apply to a publicly financed private provider. If the public is paying, it should know what is being purchased, what quality is required, who is eligible, and what happens when the provider fails. Public financing does not excuse opaque private delivery. Public ownership does not excuse poor public delivery.

Consider a hypothetical town opening additional care places. The capital work is only the beginning. There must be a recurring budget, a trained workforce, hours that fit the intended users, a route for resolving problems, and an honest plan for demand. If the expansion depends on workers accepting wages that make their own lives insecure, the town has transferred the problem rather than solved it.

A capable society takes the work of provision seriously. It does not regard the person who maintains the common foundation as a cheap input to somebody else’s freedom.

That is one of the places where public investment and labor policy meet.

Paying for a larger promise

At some point we have to stop admiring the idea and pay for it.

I favor a progressive contribution to a dependable foundation of services, combined with rules that reduce avoidable costs and expand productive capacity. The details would have to be legislated and costed. This chapter is a proposed direction, not a claim that a particular tax schedule has already been shown to finance every item in the book.

A credible plan begins with the job. Which service will be expanded? For whom? At what standard? How many workers and facilities are required? What is the current spending, and which part is already committed? How quickly can the service grow without sacrificing quality? These questions produce a cost range and a timetable. They also reveal where money alone is insufficient.

The financing must then match the obligation. A permanent service requires a dependable recurring source. A one-time asset sale cannot responsibly be presented as permanent annual revenue. Borrowing for a long-lived investment must account for repayment, interest, maintenance, and risk. A projected efficiency gain should not be spent twice, or treated as certain before it has been achieved.

Taxes also have consequences. The person legally responsible for a tax is not necessarily the only person who bears its economic burden. Prices, wages, investment, location, and behavior may adjust. A serious proposal should estimate those effects, disclose uncertainty, and revise the design when evidence warrants it. The same applies when a tax is cut.

These complications do not make ambition impossible. They make it necessary to do the work.

I would rather argue honestly for a contribution than offer a fictional free lunch and leave the service underfunded when the promise arrives at the front desk. If a program is worth having, we should explain why, who pays, and what people receive. Households should be able to examine the net effect on their circumstances, not simply a tax line isolated from the private bill it may replace.

There will be disagreements about that net effect and about fairness. Good. Those are political questions a democracy should be mature enough to discuss.

Build where the constraint is real

Spending more does not automatically mean providing more of the thing people need. A service may be constrained by staffing, premises, training, coordination, or a rule that blocks an otherwise workable form of delivery. Sometimes several constraints bind at once.

The response should be specific. If the problem is too few trained workers, a subsidy to customers alone may leave them bidding for the same limited places. If the problem is a building that cannot obtain approval, training more workers will not open its doors. If a service exists but only during incompatible hours, a nominal expansion may leave the intended users excluded.

This is where an ambitious public agenda should be willing to challenge its own routines. Rules that protect health, safety, accessibility, and labor standards have purposes worth defending. Other requirements may be redundant, poorly targeted, or designed around circumstances that no longer apply. Reviewing them is part of public responsibility.

A public-interest approach should be able to say yes to useful construction and yes to the standards that make the finished result safe. It should also be able to explain a refusal and provide a timely path to resolve the problem. Delay without responsibility is a poor form of governance.

Competition can help where providers can genuinely enter and users can make informed choices. It requires attention to switching costs, information, and market power. A market with one practical supplier should not be praised for its theoretical alternatives. Nor should public procurement quietly become a permanent entitlement for the same favored firm.

The best institution is the one that can deliver the public purpose under accountable conditions. That may mean direct provision, nonprofit delivery, regulated private provision, or a combination. The choice should follow the service and the evidence rather than a ritual allegiance to one ownership label.

My allegiance is to the person who needs the door to open.

Share responsibility without losing it

The United States presents a particular challenge because responsibilities are distributed across levels of government. My proposal would use that structure rather than allow it to become an excuse for endless referral.

National policy should establish a dependable floor and contribute financing that does not depend entirely on a community’s local tax base. States should have clearly defined obligations for administration, standards, and coordination. Local institutions should help adapt delivery to actual geography and needs. The exact division would differ by service; the essential rule is that the public can identify who is responsible for each failure and who has the power to fix it.

This is a proposed division of work, not a description of a single existing law. It would need democratic agreement, careful legal design, and implementation suited to each program.

The resident should not be expected to understand the whole intergovernmental map before receiving a correct answer. If an office is the wrong door, it should provide a useful route to the right one and make the handoff work. At the same time, simplifying access should not become an excuse to gather every possible piece of personal information in a central file. Collect what the service needs, protect it, and keep rights of review visible.

Public reporting should also distinguish money appropriated, money spent, capacity opened, and people actually served. A large announcement is one event. A functioning service is another. The space between them is where competent government has to live.

An appeal should have an owner and a deadline. A contractor should face consequences for failing the agreement. A public agency should not be immune from scrutiny because its purpose is admirable. Residents should have ways to be heard that do not depend on knowing the right person.

A more generous society needs more competence, not less accountability.

Leave the next person something usable

There is an intergenerational question behind all of this. What are we handing forward?

A future citizen can inherit a public debt and also a productive asset. They can inherit a balanced-looking account alongside neglected infrastructure. They can inherit a well-funded institution that no longer serves its purpose. We need to examine the whole inheritance, including the condition and usefulness of what remains.

This is why public wealth cannot be measured only by a fund’s market value. It includes the capacity embodied in people and institutions: what can be learned, repaired, supplied, and trusted. Some of that value is difficult to price. Difficulty in pricing it is not evidence that it has no value.

A library does not have to send every reader an invoice to justify its existence. A school should help a person think, even when the most important thing they later do with that ability is refuse a bad idea. Care can be worth providing because someone needs it. Economic benefits strengthen a case where they exist; they should not be the only language in which a human claim is permitted.

At the same time, respect for public wealth includes ending activities that no longer serve people. Protecting an institution’s purpose can require changing its methods, leadership, or form. The public should inherit something usable, rather than a collection of arrangements preserved because nobody wanted the argument.

That is the kind of ownership I want us to practice: attentive, patient, willing to repair, and willing to change.

Norway’s example reminds us that a country can decide to carry a resource forward. The larger challenge is to carry forward a society in which ordinary people can use their abilities. We will not accomplish it through one fund or one law. We can accomplish parts of it through many concrete decisions that share a clear purpose.

The person earning a living should be able to build a life on something firmer than a sequence of private emergencies.

The wealth we build together should give them that ground.