Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson is up in arms about a recent agreement between the city of Dubuque and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to fix what HUD said was a racially discriminatory system for the way the city distributed federally funded housing vouchers and has been asking the GOP presidential candidates who come on his show to comment on it.

Last week, Mike Huckabee told Mickelson that the agreement, in which Dubuque has agreed not to discriminate in housing vouchers against people moving to the area from predominantly African American areas like Chicago and Milwaukee, amounted to “redistributing poverty.”

In an interview yesterday, Ben Carson also addressed the Dubuque agreement, saying it was reminiscent of “communist countries.”

When Mickelson told him that the agreement means that “people in Eastern Iowa, for instance, have to recruit from Chicago their poverty-afflicted individuals to bring them to Iowa in order to qualify for Section 8 housing,” Carson was aghast.

“Right, this is just an example of what happens when we allow the government to infiltrate every part of our lives,” he said. “This is what you see in communist countries where they have so many regulations encircling every aspect of your life that if you don’t agree with them, all they have to do is pull the noose. And this is what we’ve got now. Every month, dozens of regulations — business, industry, academia, every aspect of our lives — so that they can control you.

“And this is exactly what Thomas Jefferson predicted. He said the people would become lackadaisical, they would not be vigilant, the government would grow, it will infiltrate every part of their lives, it will take over. But just before, just before we become another type of government, the people will wake up. I’m hoping that that this is the time when they wake up.”