If the bad guys in the classic movie, “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” had been corporate apologists or obnoxious Trump-like rich tycoons, the classic line about badges might read this way: 

“Government? We don’t need no stinkin’ government.” 

As Paul Buchheit writes on AlterNet we regularly hear variations on that theme from the wealthy in the form of the tired old saw, “I made it on my own…didn’t need any government help.” Corporate CEOs and lobbyists rail against rules and regulations that supposedly stifle entrepreneurship and eat profits.

But Buchheit dispels what he calls “the bull of Wall Street” and cites five reasons why the super-rich and big business may need government more than the rest us.

Public security is much better now than in 1765, when resentment against the wealthy erupted, Buchheit writes. Mobs of poor people occupied and looted homes of the rich in Boston in an effort to achieve, according to a report by colonial officials, a “general leveling and taking away the distinction of rich and poor.”

Now the government—local, state and federal—spends hundreds and hundreds of billion dollars in police protection, emergency services and the military to “focus on crimes against wealth.”

Click here to learn more reasons why government rules and regulations benefit big business and the super-rich, how the government-built infrastructure is essential to their success, how corporate welfare is a much stronger safety net than programs aimed at families and how the government cleans up after some of the most colossal disasters the rich and big corporations lead us into.