Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told a crowd in South Carolina this week that unemployed people were like children who wanted to eat before they had done their chores.

At a closed-door Charleston event put on by conservative activist Mallory Factor, King said that there were over 100 million people between the ages of 16 and 74 who were "simply not in the work force."

"Now, what kind of a family, if you had six kids and a third of you kids would say, 'I'm not doing the chores, mom'?" he opined. "If any of them say, 'I refuse, I'm not going to participate, I'm not going to contribute to the American GDP,' pretty soon those kids would be on the -- you get to eat after you do the work! Not just in hopes that one day you might actually do the work!"

"And so here we sit, this great big country that is a family, and we have common interests and a common history and a common culture and a common language and we have free enterprise capitalism, and this all should tie us together," King continued. "See what's happening? A hundred million Americans aren't contributing. And yet, we're looking out across the border and saying, let's bring in some more people that are uneducated, unskilled. And we're going to put them into the unskilled workforce, and somehow we're going to increase our economy."

The Iowa Republican argued that "there's not one person the world that's memorized the names" of all of the welfare programs offered by the United States government, which he claimed "guarantee almost a middle class standard of living."

Near the end of his remarks, King recalled that he had been criticized by "one of those left-wing mainstream media outlets" for not correcting a constituent who told him that President Barack Obama was a "Muslim and a Marxist."

"I don't know his religion, I don't question that at all," the congressman explained. "But my answer was, 'Well, he's at least a Marxist.' And they didn't criticize that part. They don't want to go down that path."

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)