United Airlines CEO Doubles Down On Wealth Taxes, Wants Compulsory National Service

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is doubling down after calling for a national wealth tax and inheritance taxes approaching 100%. Now he’s also calling for compulsory national service. His tax proposals are a bad idea. They discourage saving and investment while incentivizing consumption. They have real consequences for people who aren’t wealthy, through lower productivity and slower wage growth. They mean more spending on Polaris suites and caviar, less capital left for the future. Now he’s also calling for compulsory national service in multiple interviews. “We need to stop punting some of our problems to the next generation,” he said. “I have seven kids. I care about what the country is going to be like for them.” More non-consensus takes and candor from C-suites, please! https://t.co/jo9MgU7rjI — Annmarie Hordern (@annmarie) October 21, 2026 Kirby doesn’t identify which problems he wants to solve with compulsory service or how long people would be conscripted. He attended the Air Force Academy and started his career at the Pentagon. I can understand why he’d value that experience. It doesn’t follow that everyone else should be required to follow a government-approved path. Young People Are Already Building Things The case for compulsory service focuses on what young people can accomplish if they’re assigned to useful work. It’s easy to see the infrastructure that gets built or the tutoring program, and harder to see the business that never got started, the training that was postponed, or the family that lost childcare. It’s important to look at what people were already doing at the ages targeted by national service proposals: Bill Gates was 19 when he and Paul Allen developed and sold the software that began Microsoft. Michael Dell was 19 when he started his computer company with $1,000. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he launched Facebook. Patrick Collison was 21 and John Collison was 19 when they started building Stripe, making it easier for other businesses to accept payments online. Boyan Slat founded The Ocean Cleanup at 18. He chose a problem and built an organization around it. That’s service, too. The uses a young person has for their time are valuable too! And it’s their life. You can’t assume the same opportunities and deliverables just happen, deferred (and even that deferral is a real cost). You also don’t have to become a billionaire to justify choosing your own work. An electrician, aircraft mechanic, and someone working to support their family are already contributing to society and their community as well as themselves. So is someone caring for a parent. The idea that young people need to be forced out of their chosen lives to begin serving society assumes away much of what they’re already doing, as well as their freedom and agency. An activity’s inclusion in a government program doesn’t make it more valuable. Cheap Labor Isn’t Free Labor Most people don’t know that we have Milton Friedman to thank for ending the draft. And his arguments apply here too. Compulsory service can make labor look inexpensive to the government by imposing the cost on the people required to serve. If someone would need substantially more compensation to accept an assignment voluntarily, requiring them to do it for less amounts to a tax collected through their labor. Their lost opportunities don’t disappear because they aren’t paid their market value. And low cost workers give organizations less reason to use their time carefully, leaving people to accomplish less than they would have produced elsewhere. Useful output doesn’t establish that the program makes us better off. And research using Denmark’s military draft lottery finds that compulsory service has a long-term cost to earnings. This also seems like the worst possible time for such a policy given the country’s aging population, and declining birth rates. Redirecting young people out of employment, delaying training, and postponing businesses while creating labor shortages is going to create huge costs to the economy. Individual Agency Matters Breeding conformity, limiting the choices people can funnel themselves into, and directing people into established organizations with approved projects limits creativity – and creative solutions to the ‘pressing problems’ Kirby non-specifically wants to solve. Even if broader options were theoretically available through a service program, participants would have to persuade a program administrator that it deserves an exemption. And Kirby himself understands the value of independent judgment! He’s described finding “where everyone else is wrong” as how you create value. Young people should have the freedom to pursue that, even when older people like Kirby think they should be doing something else. I tend to be first and foremost a consequentialist, but at a fundamental level people also just own their own lives. People shouldn’t have to prove their choices outperform a government assignment. Compulsory service means a penalty for refusing. If the objective is to address problems that benefit the whole country, fund those projects and recruit people willing to do them. Making young adults supply underpaid labor places a huge burden on the precise generation Kirby says he doesn’t want left holding the bill. Topics on this page