Koch Honcho: Minimum Wage Brings Fascism

According to leaked audio from the Koch brothers’ political strategy summit in June, their top strategist, Richard Fink, drew some unusual parallels between raising the minimum wage and fascism. He argued that the big danger of raising the minimum wage “isn’t the fact that some people are being paid more than their value-added—that’s not great,” but rather the “500,000 people that will not have a job because of minimum wage.” “We’re taking these 500,000 people that would have had a job, and putting them unemployed, making dependence part of government programs, and destroying their opportunity for earned success. And so we see this is a very big part of recruitment in Germany in the ’20s. If you look at the Third—the rise and fall of the Third Reich—you can see that. And what happens is a fascist comes in and offers them an opportunity, finds the victim—Jews or the West—and offers them meaning for their life, OK?” Fink capped off his speech by asserting that this is the “recruitment ground for fascism, and it’s not just historical. It’s what goes on today in the—in the suicide bomber recruitment.”