An extra 20 minutes of spending on the NHS, perhaps? A couple of days of the furlough scheme? Another “eat-out-to-help out” week when we all get a half-price pizza? A climate summit or two, or Netflix vouchers for every teenager volunteering to get their seventh Pfizer jab?

If it didn’t need to go towards paying down the national debt, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, may already have been thinking of some eye-catching, focus-group friendly ways in which he could spend the £600 million the Government was awarded by the High Court this week. It’s all thanks to the National Fund, set up in 1928, with an anonymous £500,000 donation, to accept money from wealthy benefactors.

The idea was that, via compound interest and new contributions, the National Fund would one day build up into enough money to pay off the debt in full. Now, however, it seems that this objective has been judged so ludicrously far-fetched that it can be put to one side and the Government can have the money.

Legally, this is probably right. The National Fund has grown to £600 million. But given that the national debt is now £2.2 trillion, or £72,000 per taxpayer, and is rising at £5,170 per second, even if the whole fund had been put into Apple shares 30 years ago there is no way it was ever going to pay off the vast sums the state has borrowed. And yet morally, the decision was surely a mistake.

The fund was a monument to a happier time when we had a better sense of what government borrowing actually meant. It was a reminder that, 90 years ago, people actually trusted that their money would not be wasted by the government – so much so that they were willing to donate more than they owed in tax to an endeavour designed to alleviate the burden on taxpayers. As quaint as the notion might appear to today’s politicians, it also told us that the debt was once seen as deeply embarrassing – taken on to fight the Great War, but that like a mortgage it would need to be paid back one day, and that we might even aspire to run a surplus, and put some money aside for a rainy day (or a pandemic, come to think of it).

Perhaps most importantly, the fund was a permanent rebuke to the kind of fashionable economists who argue that more borrowing and more debt is a good thing in itself, irrespective of how wisely the government spends the cash, and that we can keep on printing more money and taking it onto the government’s books forever without any consequences. The anonymous donor in 1928 didn’t believe that, and neither did the other contributors over the years. Their views should carry more weight than they do today.

Another £600 million is not going to keep the Chancellor, and even less his free-spending neighbour, going for more than a few days at most. If it could be used for current spending, it would be lost in the accounts.

So we should be keeping the money exactly where it is. Even better, we should give it a website and a Twitter feed and open it to fresh donations. Like the calorie counters on restaurant menus, or those flashing signs that tell you are over the speed limit, it would be a gentle reminder that discipline, frugality, and paying your bills on time, are all valuable qualities, and while we may not always live up to those values, we should at least try. If we could re-learn that, it would be £600 million well spent.