Last week, thousands of fast-food workers picketed their employers to protest their meager paychecks — in an industry where the median wage is $9 an hour, and a nation where the minimum wage is $7.25.

Back when unions were strong, we would have called it a wildcat strike. Today, it’s more an echo of the Occupy movement, which called attention to “the 99 percent” and income inequality we would have found unbelievable a generation ago.

The figures don’t lie. Since the economy crashed in 2008 – a crash caused, lest we forget, by the elite financial institutions who’d won freedom from regulation – the gains have accrued almost entirely to the top 1 percent.

By 2012, corporate profits set record highs as a proportion of the economy, zooming to 11.1 percent. Meanwhile, wages fell to their all-time low, 43.5 percent. As recently as the last Clinton years, wages were 49 percent, thanks to following a brief increase in middle class incomes for the first time in decades.

Henry Ford, no friend of the labor movement, operated under the simple idea that workers who made his Ford automobiles ought to be able to buy them, and raised wages accordingly. We’ve since replaced the Ford principle with the Wal-Mart principle, summed up in its slogan, “Always the Low Price.”

Since the 1970s, corporate America has operated as if setting retail prices at the lowest possible levels was an unalloyed good. Resistance to reasonable minimum wages grew prodigious. If the minimum wage, $1.60 in 1968, had been adjusted for inflation, it would now be $10.70.

Millions of families now dependent on food stamps and federal tax credits would have remained taxpaying citizens, and we wouldn’t be having this endless debate about welfare and whether we can afford it.

Yes, the arguments are familiar. In the auto industry Ford founded — source of the highest blue-collar wages and the highest profits the world had ever seen — unions proved unable to cope with the industry’s decline and the rise of Japan. But to the degree an adjustment was necessary it’s long since occurred.

Yet the new orthodoxy, that the only direction wages (and taxes) can ever go is down, has reached the point we must seriously consider whether the 1960s middle class still exists.

To the extent the wage-cut argument made sense, it applied to manufacturing and industries that could be off-shored, not to the fast food we produce and sell to each other.

I recall a conversation years ago with a restaurant owner who criticized an editorial I’d written advocating a minimum wage increase. If such an increase occurred, he’d have to raise the price on every burger, he said. I asked how much. The answer: two cents (perhaps a nickel today.) The idea that customers might be willing to pay another two cents hadn’t occurred to him.

There, in a nutshell, is our dilemma. If each business feels compelled to keep prices at levels producing poverty wages, no one can increase them. But if we set a standard, such as a higher minimum wage, then paychecks can return to more tolerable levels.

The principle applies to our second great dilemma. After a living wage, how do we provide health care to workers, as every other country does?

Sen. Susan Collins recently delivered a radio address arguing that the Affordable Care Act’s definition of full-time work at 30 hours a week would cause businesses to cut hours. What she didn’t say is that if it were 40 hours, as she suggests, businesses would be cutting hours, too – if the low-price principle always applies.

Wal-Mart began hollowing out traditional employee benefits when it schooled new hires in how to apply for Medicaid. Not only were its workers charged with lowering prices, but taxpayers had to kick in, too.

Health care, as faithful readers know, is a huge exception to the “always the low price” principle; there are no low prices anywhere. But that cartel must be dealt with on its own terms.

If we really believe business can’t afford to offer health benefits to employees, we must move speedily to a taxpayer-based national system. And McDonald’s and Wal-Mart should lead the charge.

Any economic system needs balance to survive. Ours lacks it. Bill Clinton, whose tax policies were a boon to the middle class but whose embrace of financial deregulation was disastrous, wondered aloud how we could stem the growing inequality already evident by the 1990s.

It’s not that hard. A higher minimum wage, and a greater reliance on corporate taxes and the incomes of the 1 percent would be a good start. It’s not orthodox, but it’s the truth.

Douglas Rooks is a former daily and weekl   y newspaper editor who has covered the State House for 28 years. He can be reached at [email protected].