This is what the US should have done. Huge amounts of collective wealth, frittered away. Alaska’s the only state I know of that even kind-of demands that permanent extraction from the very land under our feet benefit its people broadly, instead of only a few.
Alaska does the exact opposite of what you are glamorizing, by frittering away extracted wealth on a state UBI (which many recipients use to avoid building careers or skills).
At least the unrecoverable wealth of the very land of the state is distributed to residents, I mean. That’s not the opposite, it’s just less than the ideal of capturing quite a bit of that value and investing it for citizens’ benefit so that some of the wealth isn’t lost to a few private hands forever. It’s the closest the US gets to doing something that’s a good idea, with its vast non-renewable natural resources.
When the oil music stops and residents have to pull their weight via value-added production or services, residents of Texas (where the economy is rapidly diversifying, but makes no effort at a UBI) are going to be better off than residents of Alaska.
It's just generational theft at that point, you're taking resources that could be utilized by (some cultures would say belong to) future generations and instead have set up a structure that has the effect of letting the current generation drink the money away, not to mention the poor prospects of the future generations growing up in a system like that. I know Japan has a culture that believes that we are stewards of the land for the youth.
America lately has collectively decided to toss in their babies to fuel their furnace of war.
