Ex-Wheel of Fortune host rips minimum wage workers for wanting hike: 'Earn your way in this world’

Chuck Woolery, game show host turned podcaster, brandished his conservative bona fides on Sunday by opposing an increase in the minimum wage and reminiscing about the 1950s-era blackballing of actors for political dissent.

During a promotional appearance for his new podcast, Blunt Force Truth, Woolery blasted actor Matt Damon for taking a swipe at presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and condemning a banking system that "steals people's money" while delivering his commencement address for MIT's class of 2016.

"In the '50s in Hollywood if you spoke for communism, you were blackballed," Woolery recalled. "In the '90s and 2000s in Hollywood if you speak for communism, you're rewarded for it. But if you speak against communism, you're blackballed."

According to the former Wheel of Fortune host, liberal policies like increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour would have dire consequences on the U.S. economy.

"Most people don't realize that it's not a good thing, it's a bad thing," he opined. "I think it's the liberals' job to take the simple and make it as complex as possible. I think it's the conservatives' job -- and we don't do a very good job of it -- to take the complex and make it as simple as possible."

"The things that sound really good -- this knee-jerk reaction to 15 bucks an hour -- my son is 20 years old, he would love to make $15 an hour," Woolery continued, arguing that McDonald's would replace workers with robots instead of paying a higher minimum wage.

"You've got to earn your way in this world, and if it costs them $15 a hour and you're a small business and it ruins the business, what good does it do?"

Woolery added: "These are people who are starting off. They're not people who have families by and large."

A Center of Economic and Policy Research analysis found in 2014 that the average age for a minimum wage worker had risen to 35 years old, and that 88 percent of employees who earned the minimum wage were older than 20 years of age.

Watch the video below from Fox News' Fox & Friends, broadcast June 6, 2016.