A scene in Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls has the protagonist sternly lecturing a ruffian on the importance of paying for air in a domed city on the moon. I still can't tell if Heinlein was serious; a later scene has the same character demanding a transplanted foot be cut off because he felt it indebted him.
Heinlein might be the kind of person to genuinely believe that. He also was the kind of person who would write a book as an excuse to write a manifesto. Starship Troopers was just him bitching about "kids these days"