Should the government acquire a portfolio of stocks and bonds, in the name of the people? One model championed by Jacobin writer Matt Bruenig is a “social wealth fund” (SWF), also known as a sovereign wealth fund. Bruenig’s preferred use for such a fund is to finance a Universal Basic Income (UBI), but other types of expenditures are conceivable. I’m not here to trash the proposal, but I do see some misperceptions surrounding it.

For socialists who want the means of production to come under public ownership, an SWF may seem like a no-brainer. One potential motive is to reduce the political sway of the capitalist class, whose vast wealth enables them to exert intolerable influence on elections and political decisions. Another is to flatten the peak of the wealth distribution.

A school of thought that has recently surfaced in the wake of the Amazon wage increase (the impact of which may be mixed) holds that policy proposals should be evaluated purely in terms of their agitational impact. To be sure, political struggle makes change possible. However, if we hope that a victorious President Ocasio-Cortez would construct an SWF, we ought to venture into the weeds of the rationale for such a fund, how it would come into being and operate.