Thom Hartmann: Yeah Feebaby in our chatroom says, you know, well actually it’s scrolled off now, but from my memory what it said was, ‘when I see some rich white guy CEOs being frog marched off on 'Cops' then I’m guessing this is not going to be a problem anymore.’ I agree with you Feebaby.

Let me just lay this out and then we’ll pick up your phone calls on the topic. There is a difference between an essentially Fascistic, it’s not even quite the right word because Fascism is the merger of corporate and state interests but let’s say well for lack of a better word. An oppressive government and an organized, an economically organized society.

When I was 15 years old I wanted to get a job at Henry’s Hamburgers in Lansing, Michigan, and because I was too young to work in the state of Michigan, the state of Michigan, heavy union influence and you had to be at least 16 to work, I had to get a work permit, which means I had to have my parents fill out a form, I had to go to the local state office and I had to get somebody to sign off on this saying yes he has permission to actually work and I got this job working at Henry’s, flipping burgers for a buck and a quarter an hour or whatever the minimum wage was back then. And there was some organization to it. And what that was all about is defining the work place.

This goes back to David Ricardo the, what is it, 19th century? He was writing in 1817 his theory of economics, you know, “On Labor"” and “On Wages” and things. And what he defined as what he called his “Iron law of wages,” which is as the labor force goes up, lacking an increase in demand for labor, the price of labor goes down, wages go down. Real simple stuff.

So the difference is between a Fascistic society and a well organized and functioning democracy that actually has an economy that works is that in the Fascistic society if you’re walking down the street, if you’re driving down the street, if your car light is out, somebody can stop you and say, 'prove to me you’re a citizen and if you’re not, if you can’t make that proof right there on the spot, off you go to jail.' I’m guessing that probably 20 to 30 percent of my listeners and viewers right now have no idea, I’ll bet a lot of you don’t even know where your birth certificate is.

That is, that’s a government out of control. On the other hand, when you show up and say I’d like to enter into a legal contract. I would like to participate with an entity that has been brought into creation by the government, that is to say a corporation, a business. If I want to start a business, I’m running one right now, this radio show. I had to go to the government and say I want to create a corporation, I would like legal liability protections, I’d like to be able to deduct the cost of a lunch if it’s a business expense, I’d like to be able to deduct the cost of advertising, I’d like to be able to pay employees. You know, there’s all these things, all these benefits that I get from this. And in exchange for that, there’s certain rules that have to do with work and all that kind of stuff.

So, if somebody goes and says, 'you know, I want to work', then at that point it’s not inappropriate to say, 'okay' show that you’re eligible to work, that you’re not 10 years old, that you are a US citizen.' I have no problem with that. But there’s a bright line of difference between the two. We don’t want to live in a world where you have to worry as you’re walking down the street about 'show me your papers please'.

On the other hand, if we don’t have, you know, some limits on who can work and how and when and how much, in other words some involvement between labor unions and government in the work supply, then you’re going to see the middle class evaporate. If we don’t have minimum wage laws, if we don’t have maximum hour laws. If we don’t have the 40 hour a week, used to be the 50 hour week. These are things that labor unionists fought and died for.

If we don’t have children out of the labor force. You know, the child labor movement was not a compassionate movement. I mean it was used, certainly there were some people who were in it about the compassion, but mostly the big proponents of passing child labor laws were the unions because they didn’t want the competition. If you make the, again David Ricardo, 1817. Make the labor force smaller, the price of labor goes up, wages go up, wages go up and what do you get? You get a middle class. Which is increasingly vanishing.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.