Scott Kirby runs United Airlines. He is not a senator, not a socialist organizer, and until recently not a fixture of American political commentary. But in a column for American Thinker, writer Noel S. Williams argues that the airline chief has earned a place alongside Bernie Sanders in what he calls the “commie cabal” — all because Kirby has come out in favor of a national wealth tax on the rich.
Williams’ October 22 piece, headlined “Bernie and Kirby: Dumb and dumberer socialists,” is less an argument than a prosecution. He opens by suggesting Kirby should be worrying about United’s “dreadful customer service reputation” instead of “spouting socialist dogma.” He then moves to a blunt market argument: anyone weighing a stock purchase should scrutinize management, and Kirby, in his view, “appears to be a complete dunce” for wading into politics with elections looming.
The column’s central claim is that a wealth tax is a proven failure, and that its advocates either don’t know the history or don’t care. It is worth taking that claim seriously, because it is the load-bearing wall of the whole piece.
Where the wealthy go when taxes rise
Williams builds his case from the behavior of billionaires in high-tax states. He notes that Mark Zuckerberg has come out against California’s Proposition 40, described in the column as the “California Wealth Tax,” and reportedly considered leaving the state outright — staying, per the column, only after a new class of shares preserved his control. Elon Musk, Williams adds, has already left California, and Jeff Bezos decamped to Florida. Many other wealthy residents, he writes, have “skedaddled from high-tax jurisdictions.”
The implication is straightforward: tax wealth aggressively and the wealth, or at least the wealthy, will leave. Williams doesn’t dwell on counterarguments, but he does point readers toward research from the Cato Institute cataloguing countries that repealed their own wealth taxes after disappointing results. His characterization is that outcomes have been “mixed” but “lean heavily toward ignominious failure.”
The Sweden problem
The more interesting section of the column turns on Sanders himself. Williams notes that the Vermont senator frequently holds up Sweden as a model for the United States — a framing the columnist treats with open suspicion, needling Sanders over a honeymoon in the Soviet Union to argue his sense of a “socialist utopia” is unreliable.
From there, Williams assembles what he presents as inconvenient facts. First, Sweden has high wealth inequality — by his account, higher than the country Sanders routinely criticizes — and he cites rankings to back it up, along with a second source offering a different perspective on the same statistics. Second, and more pointedly, Sweden abolished its wealth tax in 2007, well before Sanders kept touting the country’s socialistic ways. The columnist frames this as hypocrisy: what’s good for the goose, he writes, is not good for the gander.
Then comes the detail he seems to relish most. Sanders, in Williams’ telling, regards billionaires as “anathema to his commie orthodoxy,” more than a mere policy mistake. Yet Sweden — the country Sanders promotes as America’s future — has more billionaires per capita than the United States. Williams repeats the point deliberately, then repeats it again in print, just to make sure it lands.
Fairness and who gets to define it
The column closes by asking which man is dumber, Kirby or Sanders, and declines to pick. What it does assert is that neither flies the “friendly skies” — a jab at United’s slogan — and neither has the wisdom to determine what “fairness” means. That authority, Williams writes, belongs to free markets and to the collective judgment of producers and consumers, “not Soviet-style commissars.” Free-market capitalism, he concludes, remains the surest path men have devised to mass prosperity.
Readers should weigh the piece for what it is: an opinion column with a sharp partisan edge, not a neutral accounting of the wealth-tax debate. Kirby’s actual remarks are characterized rather than quoted at length, and the column does not engage with arguments that wealth taxes might raise substantial revenue or that billionaire departures are less economically decisive than they appear. The Cato research is invoked rather than examined, and the inequality rankings are linked but not detailed.
Still, the underlying question the column raises is not frivolous. If Sanders holds up Sweden as the template, what should be made of the fact that Sweden itself abandoned the wealth tax nearly two decades ago, and that it counts more billionaires per capita than the country Sanders wants to remake? Williams treats that as a knockout. Supporters of wealth taxation would presumably answer that Sweden’s overall tax-and-transfer system, not its repealed wealth tax specifically, is the relevant comparison — a response the column doesn’t anticipate or address.
What the piece does do effectively, as a matter of rhetoric, is turn the debate from abstractions to examples. It asks voters to consider Zuckerberg eyeing the exits, Musk already gone, Bezos in Florida, and a CEO of a major airline deciding that tax “fairness” is a cause worth publicly embracing. Whether that amounts to a damning indictment or a distraction from United’s actual business is, like so much in this column, a matter of where the reader already stands.
Williams, for his part, has no doubt. Two socialists, in his framing, one in the Senate and one in the corner office — and neither, he writes, with the “sagacity” to know what fairness means.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/bernie-and-kirby-dumb-and-dumberer-socialists/