Mike Rowe: Low labor participation paired with high unemployment a 'matter of national security'

As inflation soars and Americans are left with less expendable income, the low U.S. labor participation rate combined with high unemployment compounds the problem to the point it may in fact endanger national security, Fox Business host Mike Rowe said Thursday on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

Rowe, founder of the MikeRoweWORKS foundation based out of his hometown of Baltimore, as well as the acclaimed host of "Dirty Jobs" and "Deadliest Catch", said that the government's disincentivizing of work and incentivizing of idleness goes "right to our identity as a people."

"This is no longer a matter of a skills gap or a few million people unemployed and employers frustrated because of the mismatching skills," said Rowe, who often advocates for Americans to pursue jobs in the trades, where there has long been a shortage, "This is a matter of national security."

"When I started that foundation MikeRoweWORKS, 13 years ago on Labor Day, we had record-high unemployment. Every morning I woke up. I was shooting ‘Dirty Jobs’ and I would look at the headlines in the paper and it was always a click up. 8%, 8.5%, 9%."

"Everywhere we went on ‘Dirty Jobs’ we saw help-wanted signs. It became obvious something else was happening in the country... Thirteen years ago and there were 2.3 million open positions. Today it’s 11 million."

As host Tucker Carlson noted, President Biden has impacted the labor market by both incentivizing people to quit lower-paying jobs and instead receive a taxpayer subsidy, and by printing trillions of U.S. dollars out of thin air, which devalues the currency held by Americans.

Carlson asked Rowe about the apparently erstwhile belief in America that we as a people respect labor and the value of work.

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"Part of the fault in our stars is that we come to resent the very things we rely upon so when the power goes out for three or four days up… people shake their fists at the linemen because they are frustrated – but the linemen are trying to get the power back on," he replied. 

"We don’t really respect it. In fact, skilled labor, all too often, reminds the rest of us of what we are fundamentally lacking. The thing that scares me more than anything in the reason I started the foundation when I did was 13 years ago for every five tradesmen that retired two replaced them -- This is what Abraham Lincoln called a terrible arithmetic."