When the power to your small business gets cut off, your rent goes up, or your local shop closes, who is actually responsible?

Some politicians and media commentators want you to believe it’s the fault of the greedy front-line workers, a recent immigrant or a person on NDIS.

However the real culprit is a handful of giant corporate monopolies buying up Australia and making you pay the bill.

Take our energy grid. Small businesses can lose tens of thousands in revenue waiting on corporatised utilities to restore power after an outage.

The big business lobby calls this “red tape” and want you to blame the government. But these corporations have actually co-designed the rules and regulations as corporate liability shield to to protect their profits at your expense.

When there’s hundreds of regulations, only enormous businesses with inhouse lawyers can handle it — small and medium businesses can’t compete against the big business or are forced to use the big business’s services rather than a smaller competitor.

When red-tape is cut, that does not create a free or fair market for small operators. Rather, it unleashes the giant multinationals to write the rules, shift operational risks onto small contractors, and eliminate smaller competitors.

Excessive red tape isn’t “communism” — it is monopoly capitalism using its excessive power to shield itself from competition and democratic accountability. Adam Smith warned that capitalists always seeks to destroy competition.

Monopoly, besides, is a great enemy to good management, which can never be universally established, but in consequence of that free and universal competition which forces every body to have recourse to it for the sake of self defence. Adam Smith

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or utopia should ever be established in it. Not only the prejudices of the public, but what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it… manufacturers set themselves against every law that is likely to increase the number of their rivals in the home market. Adam Smith

History and economics shows that the “free market” will always turn into monopolies of massive corporations. When this happens, the fundamental nature of neoliberal capitalism is to require significant sustained state protection of corporate monopolies and the privileges of the ultra-rich. This has been an essential feature of our economic system for well over a hundred years.

For thirty years, Australian governments privatised or corporatised our public assets, and created quasi-monopolies through various forms of protectionism.

Public assets were privatised with the promise of lower prices and better efficiency. Instead, we got massive corporate monopolies that act like tollbooths. They have no (or almost no) competition, which allows them to extract massive profits at the expense of everyday people and small operators.

When rent or interest rates go up and life gets harder, the corporate media and some politicians tell you to blame your neighbour, immigrants, or public sector workers. This is a classic bait-and-switch.

The corporate executives and financial elite want everyday people to fight each other over scraps. This makes it easier for corporate boardrooms to pocket keep gouging out record profits.

Look at our supermarkets. Two massive corporations control over 60 percent of Australia’s grocery market.

Both Coles and Woolworths made well over a billion dollars in profits last year. They did this while forcing regional farmers to keep prices at impossibly low levels while increasing prices for shoppers at the checkout. They then point fingers at their own workers (paid the minimum wage!) when you complain about inflation. Never-mind that the CEO of Woolworths was paid $8.6 million while breaking the law by misleading customers.

Look at housing.

You are told there is a housing shortage because of immigration and international students. Thousands of new houses and apartments are being built.

But vast numbers of those dwellings are purposely left empty by ultra-wealthy investors and developers that own 100s of properties or are hoarded by corporate landlords.

A corporation that owns 1000s of houses and apartments has only one goal: to make a much profit as possible from housing, so will always raise rents as much as possible. These corporate landlords are more than content to leave the dwellings vacant if they can’t make a profit. This is because most of the $18 billion spent by the Commonwealth government on negative gearing and capital gains discounts go to the massive corporate landlords.

Read more: What if the banks make housing less affordable?

When a big corporation like a privatised utility acts like a bully towards an individual or small business, it is excessive, unrestrained corporate power.

Big business will always try to get bigger and more powerful until a few massive companies own everything, rewrite the laws to protect their profits, and pass their risks down to you.

Real democracy means having power over your own life, your workplace, and your local economy.

Unfortunately we live in a system where big banks, energy cartels, gambling companies and property developer lobbies hold huge amounts of power. And large parts of the state see their primary job as protecting business interests and profits — which is exactly what they recommend to the politicians.

Look at the role of the central banks here in Australia and overseas. The Reserve Bank isn’t a neutral referee, but rather sees its most important function to use its interest rate setting powers to suppress wages and increase unemployment. This has been especially severe in Australia over the past decade, where interest rates have created a systemic ratcheting down of real wages. Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank has done nothing to reduce what is actually causing inflation — excessive profits from big business.

The central banks also give privileged access to newly created money to corporations and the big commercial banks, while ordinary businesses must be subjected to profiteering from those banks through high interest rates. The corporations and banks who receive this newly created money first therefore gain massive financial benefits and inflate asset prices at the direct expense of the downstream economy and small-medium businesses.

Cutting “red tape” for big corporations and blaming migrants does not make and has never made everyday people freer or wealthier. It just gives monopolies more power to profiteer, worsen safety, and ignore the needs of small operators.

We need to rebuild Australia’s essential services as genuine public goods. Power, water, housing, and healthcare should be run for public benefit, taking the profit motive out of the basics of life.

Read more: Fighting the cost-of-living crisis

The anger felt across Australia and among everyday people is entirely justified. People are getting ripped off, ignored, and pushed to the brink.

But the enemy isn’t the person on NDIS or the public sector teacher asking for a pay rise. The enemy doesn’t arrive on a leaky boat. The cause of Australia’s problems are in the corporate boardrooms and travelling in the first class private jets.