Corporate conglomerates can only appear with the help of government, interfering in the free market.
Sadly, that's just patently false. Capitalism (systematized greed) automatically seeks a monopoly for the purpose of maximum economic exploitation. Because the ideal trade in a greed-bases system is 'you (the consumer) give me all the money you have, and I (the producer) will give you as little as I can possibly get away with in return'. And the way to achieve that end is to create a monopoly that you are forced to trade with.
Nearly all markets these days are 'captive' markets. Not 'free' markets. Meaning that the buy must buy the goods and service being offered, to survive. So that if there is only one seller, or the various sellers choose to act as one entity, they can charge whatever the buyer has, regardless of the actual value of their product. Take health care, for example. The buy must literally "buy or die", and all the sellers know it. So they are ALL charging wildly inflated prices and taking in massive profits simply because they can. They have voluntarily created a monopoly, and they are using it to exploit everyone else for massive profits. And they're all riding the gravy train: the drug companies, the insurance companies, the hospital conglomerates, the medical equipment manufacturers, ...
And the only thing that can stand in the way of their continuing to fleece everyone for all they can get, is the government. Because the government can impose price caps, and set profit limits, and can even take over the hospitals and insurance and drug companies if they must to protect the people from all this blatant and destructive greed and exploitation. Which is why the capitalists spend huge sums of money bribing and corrupting the government to make sure it doesn't interfere with those massive profits.
But it's not just the health care market, it's the energy market, the housing market, the transportation and communication markets, and the job markets, too. ALL gouging the people for as much as they can get, leaving huge segments of the population constantly on the edge of economic disaster, and many beyond it. Get old, get sick, lose a job, or even a way to get to a job, and you're out. The greed-based system has no use for you if you have nothing left for it to exploit for it's own profit.
In the free markets, competition keeps things honest.
But there are very few actual free markets, anymore. Only the luxury markets, and markets that involve so much innate variety (like food) that they can't be monopolized are still free markets. Every other market: all the markets that we must participate in to survive, and NOT FREE MARKETS. They are 'captive' markets. Ideal for monopoliesto exploit for maximum profit to themselves.
An overprice product, like green energy, would not do very well in a free market. But when government interferes, such as artificially with driving up the price of oil to make green look better, then all types of problems begin. This has led to inflation since the price to ship everything increased.
The government has been bought off and is using our tax money to subsidize the big oil companies so they can keep their profits up while keeping their prices down (somewhat). If we were paying them free market prices for their gasoline, most of us could not afford to buy it. What you don't understand is that NONE OF THE OIL COMPANIES want to sell a 100 gallons of gas for $10 a gallon. They ALL want to sell 10 gallons of gas for $100 a gallon. Because all they really want to take in as much money as possible, and pay out as little as possible. They couldn't care less that only the very wealthy could afford their product. All they want is the maximum price in exchange for the least cost.
But I can see from your post that you have drunk the capitalist's coolaid and so you now believe that "free markets" will save the world, when in fact captive markets have enslaved the world, and the capitalists are using them to strangle us all, economically. But the capitalists have told you that the government is your enemy (because it's really their enemy) so now here you are blaming everything on the government, just like the capitalists have trained you to do.
Because the only thing the capitalists actually fear is a government that does in fact represent the needs of the people that they are so eager to exploit for every penny they can get.
