On yesterday’s America Live, Megyn Kelly “just asked” whether Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer was right when he alleged, as the banner on the screen put it, “PRES WANTS EUROPEAN STYLE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY BUT WON’T ADMIT IT.” The reason? President Obama wants to raise the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour.

The best thing I can say about Kelly is that at least she had Sally Kohn, a strong liberal advocate, to debate conservative Ben Ferguson.

Ferguson said it’s part of Obama’s “world view” that people should live on minimum wage - code words that it’s some kind of welfare program. According to Ferguson, Obama credo is, “Look, if you make a lot of money, you really don’t need a whole lot and I’m gonna do everything in my power to make sure those that don’t have any get it through either a government program, through me taxing you more, through me mandating bare minimums for them to show up for work.” Ferguson added, “It’s a sad American dream but that’s what he wants.”

Far from challenging that, Kelly helped affirm it. She said that Obama’s “history of comments completely bears that out.” Then she played a video montage of selectively edited Obama comments that she just happened to have at the ready.

Kohn was terrific as usual. She said that Obama is looking at equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. “American businesses have become more profitable in the last generation while wages have been stagnant or in fact, adjusted for inflation, gone down,” she said, as Ferguson started to talk over her.

Actually, "whine over her" would be a better description of what Ferguson did next. He accused Kohn of wanting to take money away from “any person who creates wealth,” of believing he or she “got some unfair advantage and so now you want to change the laws.”

In other words, wanting to raise the minimum wage is akin to robbing the makers to give to the takers. In fact, Ferguson made that more explicit when he said, “You assume that everybody at the bottom is working hard, trying to survive.”

Kohn rejoined, “Ben, you seem to think that everyone who’s struggling to get by in this country is simply lazy. …25% of Americans right now who earn low wages are working parents, who are earning the minimum wage or lower.  …The reality is, in this recovery, we have been losing middle class jobs, we have been increasing low-wage jobs while profits at the top have gone up and businesses are sitting on $2 trillion… Now, I don’t understand why conservatives want to defend the ability of the top to do well and don’t want decent wages for hard-working people.”

Ferguson insisted that Obama now wants to step in and mandate what people get paid. As if earning $9 an hour is going to put every worker on easy street and bankrupt the bosses. And while he argued that raising the minimum wage would lead to loss of employment and opportunity, he never said a thing about how to increase them.

I’d love to see Ferguson try to live on $9 an hour for two weeks and then come back and tell us again how awful it is to mandate that workers earn at least that much.

Oh, and as for his argument that raising the minimum wage would ultimately harm workers by causing employers to stop hiring? There’s plenty of research to show that it’s not true. But funny how Kelly didn’t have any of those findings at the ready, the way she had that anti-Obama video mashup.