The world has experimented with many economic systems, among them capitalism, communism, socialism, and mercantilism. Of these, capitalism has proved the most durable engine of innovation and economic growth. Yet capitalism also has serious flaws. When markets operate without sufficient oversight or a meaningful public stake, they can produce deep inequality, financial crises, social dislocation, and poverty. People excluded from prosperity understandably become receptive to socialism’s promise of stability and shared progress, even when governments pursuing that promise have often failed to deliver it.

The record of centrally planned economies is hardly encouraging. The Soviet Union collapsed after decades of stagnation and institutional decay. Cuba has endured chronic economic hardship, worsened by U.S. sanctions. Venezuela’s economy imploded under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, while China’s growth accelerated only after the market-oriented reforms introduced in 1978. But the choice need not be reduced to unrestrained capitalism on one side and state socialism on the other. The rise of sovereign wealth funds suggests a different model: governments can rely on markets to generate wealth while investing a portion of that wealth for the long-term benefit of the public. For lack of a better term, this might be called socio-capitalism.

Andrew Rozanov helped popularize the term “sovereign wealth fund” in his 2005 article “Who Holds the Wealth of Nations?” The label generally describes state-owned investment vehicles created to preserve and increase national wealth for public purposes. There is no universally accepted count because analysts differ over whether public pension funds, central-bank portfolios, development funds, and subnational investment vehicles qualify. The Sovereign Wealth Funds Report, published by IE University with ICEX-Invest in Spain, tracks 109 active funds, while the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds follows more than 100 major national funds. Broader databases count as many as 151 when development, stabilization, and subnational funds are included.

The United States has historically lacked a single, unified federal sovereign wealth fund, but it is not entirely outside this movement. Roughly 20 domestic funds operate across 19 states, often under the name “permanent fund.” The Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, the Texas Permanent School Fund, and the New Mexico State Investment Council are among the best-known examples. They demonstrate that public investment funds are not alien to American capitalism; they are already part of it.

The United States remains the world’s most powerful economy, supported by abundant resources, productive farmland, a large consumer market, and a business environment that rewards entrepreneurship. None of those advantages, however, guarantees permanent dominance. Other governments increasingly use state-backed capital to pursue strategic goals, sometimes through sovereign wealth funds holding assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Washington’s failure to build a comparable national vehicle leaves it with fewer tools for converting public wealth into lasting national capacity.

That omission reflects a deeper structural problem. For decades, U.S. taxpayers have served as equity-free venture capitalists, financing foundational research in aerospace, computing, medicine, energy, and resource extraction. Private companies then commercialize many of the resulting technologies, while the public that absorbed much of the original risk rarely receives a direct financial return. The benefits of public research are real and widespread, but the gains are distributed unevenly. Companies and founders can accumulate extraordinary fortunes from technologies whose development depended heavily on public investment.

The emerging space economy illustrates the imbalance. Interlune received a $6.9 million government grant to help develop technology for extracting helium-3, a rare isotope that the company hopes to harvest from the Moon. It has also announced substantial future purchase agreements. If publicly financed research helps make such ventures possible, taxpayers should not be limited to the indirect benefits of jobs, taxes, and technological spillovers. The federal government should negotiate an equity stake, royalty, or other mechanism that allows the public to share in the commercial upside.

The potential value of lunar helium-3 is often described in astronomical terms, though estimates reaching into the quadrillions of dollars depend on assumptions about accessible reserves, extraction costs, transport, and future demand.

Helium-3 has specialized scientific and industrial uses, and its value could rise sharply if fusion technologies eventually require it at scale. Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ SPARC project, however, is designed principally around deuterium-tritium fuel rather than a helium-3-based commercial fuel cycle. That distinction matters: the strategic case for lunar resources should rest on credible technological scenarios, not on treating uncertain future markets as guaranteed fortunes.

A federal sovereign wealth fund could provide the institutional machinery for capturing some of that value. It could be capitalized through royalties on publicly supported technologies, equity obtained in exchange for certain federal grants, returns from public assets, and a share of revenue generated from the commercial exploitation of natural resources. Managed independently and transparently, the fund could invest across generations rather than becoming another short-term pool of money for Congress to raid.

Such a fund would demand political institutions capable of thinking beyond the next election. Gerrymandered districts reward partisan entrenchment and help produce a legislature poorly suited to 30- or 50-year planning. Establishing independent, impartial redistricting systems would not by itself create a sovereign wealth fund, but it could reduce some of the political incentives that make long-range economic policy so difficult. The United States must also develop a coherent legal and security strategy for protecting its interests in space. That requires international rules, resilient infrastructure, and defensive capabilities—not speculative claims of ownership or a rush to militarize the Moon.

The principle behind the fund is capitalist: those who supply risk capital should share in the return. In this case, the investors are the American people. The proceeds could support tuition-free or substantially subsidized higher education, affordable childcare for working families and single parents, and stronger healthcare subsidies. New Mexico’s use of permanent-fund wealth to finance public priorities offers one state-level example of how investment income can widen opportunity without abandoning markets. Any national healthcare investment should also preserve patient choice, medical quality, and timely access to care.

This arrangement would differ from both the status quo and conventional state socialism. Private enterprise would continue to innovate, compete, and earn profits. The government, acting on behalf of the public, would claim a negotiated return when taxpayers provide the capital or assets that make those profits possible. Those returns would then finance broad social goods and build wealth across generations. That is the essence of a socio-capitalist model: markets would remain the engine of growth, but the public would no longer be merely a silent investor whose contribution is forgotten once the profits arrive.