Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has earned a reputation for saying odd things during media interviews, and as The New Republic noted, he continues to offer fresh evidence that bolsters his critics’ claims.

Former CEO and current Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — who wants robots to replace the American worker and wants you to shut up and take your Social Security cuts — also wants a section of the population to commit generations of their families to working in factories.

That might sound like an exaggeration, but the Cabinet secretary appeared on CNBC and really did make comments along these lines.

The initial part of Lutnick’s unscripted comments started well. “It’s time to train people, not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future,” he said, making an observation that was difficult to disagree with.

But it was the sentences that followed where he ran into trouble.

“You know, this is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here,” he said.” You know, we let the auto plants go overseas. Right now you should see an auto plant, it’s highly automated but the people — the four, five thousand people who work there — they are trained to take care of those robotic arms, they are trained to keep the air conditioning system.”

So, “the new model” that the Trump administration’s commerce secretary is excited about is one in which people work in the same job in the same factory for their adult life, before passing on that same job to their children, and then later, their children’s children.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but nothing about this model is new. In fact, it was quite common in the 19th century.

You’ve heard of “back to the future”? Lutnick apparently wants to go forward to the past.

Or as The New Republic’s piece summarized, “There’s nothing wrong with working in a factory, on its face. But Lutnick, the son of a college professor and the grandson of a dry-cleaning store owner, is suggesting that millions of people ought to commit to a generational lack of upward mobility under the guise of creating a new class of American labor. What Lutnick is so enthusiastically describing — being bound to the same job in the same industry for decades and decades — is serfdom.”

The larger question, meanwhile, is why the administration continues to let Lutnick go on television in the first place. New York magazine recently published a round-up of the commerce secretary’s “most lunkheaded moments,” and the article wasn’t especially short.