The sales pitch that David Koch was running on in 1980 on the Libertarian ticket was that government is bad, corporations are good. You can trust corporations.

But the reality is that the government that we have, which perhaps millions of Americans have literally fought and died to create and protect - George Washington had three horses shot out from underneath him trying to create this government - should be of, by, and for we the people, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln.

Corporations are never of, by, and for we the people, corporations are always of, by, and for the profit. And there's nothing wrong with that intrinsically unless it is absolutely unregulated, which is the direction that we've moving since Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1983.

What the Koch brothers are basically saying is: the government is terrible, you can't trust yourself to govern yourself, so we will govern for you by controlling the economy. It's the economy is more important than democracy. The marketplace is more important than democracy.

That's BS. It is a lie that the billionaires have frankly and sadly got a lot of Americans to believe. And once you go down that road, if you get rid of our government and you replace it with a bunch of monopolistic corporations, then you have lost all your freedom. The only thing that is standing between us and absolute corporate subjection as we had when our government was weak prior to the 1910s basically was corporate regulation.

Look at the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. People went on strike for decent wages. And what did the railroad do? They brought in machine guns and shot up not just the railroad workers but their families in the tents that they were sleeping in.

The Pullman Porter strike. The Haymarket Square riot. It just goes on and on and on.

If you get the government out of the way, what's going to happen, to paraphrase Grover Cleveland, President of the United States in his State of the Union address in 1888, he said the iron heel of industry is upon the neck of the average American.

He was talking about the railroad monopolies and they set their prices wherever they wanted. This country was birthed in opposition to monopolies.

The biggest corporation on Earth was the British East India Company in 1773. And in 1773, when there was a recession, the great panic of 1772, the East India Company had millions of pounds of tea in their warehouses in the UK that they couldn't get rid of. They couldn't sell the stuff and they had already paid taxes on it, because at that time they paid taxes once they brought it into their warehouse.

So the British government with the Tea Act of 1773 said, 'you don't have to pay your taxes on this tea, in fact, we will refund the money to you'. And the British government gave the East India Company what in today's money would be billions of dollars in tax refunds.

And then the East India Company used that money to bring that tea to the United States at a discount and tried to put out of business the small entrepreneurs up and down the East Coast who were running tea shops and importing their own tea.

And the entrepreneurs of America, the citizens of America, were so outraged about the fact that this giant transnational corporation was trying to wipe out all these small businesses - back in 1773 every other block had a tea shop on it - and the entrepreneurs of America were so outraged about this that they committed $1,000,000 in today's dollars, a million-dollar act of sabotage, of vandalism, throwing that tea in Boston Harbor.

That Boston Tea Party in the late fall / early winter of 1773 led directly to the American Revolution of 1776.

That was the point. A year before that, Thomas Jefferson had written a pamphlet called "A Summary View of the Rights of British America", encouraging Americans to be good British citizens.

Three months after the Tea Party revolt against a transnational corporation, Thomas Jefferson was saying, 'time for us to become independent of Great Britain because they're supporting these giant monopolistic corporations.'

You cannot trust giant monopolistic corporations. They are accountable to nothing except the dollar. And you will not have enough political or economic power to boycott them. You can't control them through boycotts, it doesn't work, particularly when they end up controlling entire industries.

You want insulin? And the price of insulin goes from $70 to $240 in five years simply because a company has a monopoly on a product that was invented in the 1880s? It's crazy. It's just crazy.

We do need government. We just need to get the money from these corporations and the billionaires that they created out of our government, and then we can actually have a government of, by, and for We the People. It's really that simple.