Another angle on a solution: start your own gas company with competitive margins.
Easier said than done, obviously. But maybe we should try to make it easier?
I can imagine a downward spiral of government regulation creating moats for companies that take advantage of the lack of competition, leading to ever more government interventions that further entrench the status quo.
> competitor can't afford to keep buying you out forever
Not saying this is in fact the case, but with trillions of dollars of QE and the Cantillon effect it seems entirely possible that in some industries they could.
To have a true capitalistic marketplace ala Adam Smith, you need government regulation to specifically break up oligopolies: companies which get so large they can collude and price-fix. We call these laws anti-trust laws.
In the US particularly, anti-trust laws are recklessly unenforced, leading to exactly this situation.
Easier said than done, obviously. But maybe we should try to make it easier?
I can imagine a downward spiral of government regulation creating moats for companies that take advantage of the lack of competition, leading to ever more government interventions that further entrench the status quo.