It absolutely is taking advantage. We even have a word for it its called profiteering. Being the one with the power over who has electricity or gas to heat their homes so they don't fucking die and then choosing to profit personally while others struggle to make ends meet is disgusting antisocial behavior. People who choose to do it should be shunned not praised.

Private companies absolutely do everything in their power to stop public utilities from happening.

I'm Canadian by the way the utilities in my province were all built by publicly owned companies and then some conservative dickhead managed to get elected and we have sold all of our utilities off to private companies. Now we have the highest phone and internet costs in the world and the board that is supposed regulate those companies is completely made up of former execs from those companies.

Its called regulatory capture. The reason our government doesn't work isn't incompetence though they are incompetent. Its because the people running it want it to fail so that they can sell off the things we all worked to build to their buddies.

We have single payer publicly funded hospital and doctor care as a federal law but there is no law about how it is provided as that falls under provincial jurisdiction.

So they do everything in their power to cancel things like public labs that we would have had built in time for covid and instead give contracts and public money to their buddies who run private labs.

If you read more history you will find that this sort of pattern goes back to when the English common pastures were enclosed by wealthy people who then charged the people farming those pastures rent just to farm the land theyd always farmed.