Collusion and Free Markets...

... are incompatible. It remains one of those annoyances of mine that supposedly "socially minded" individuals complain that the natural outcome of free markets/capitalism is collusion and autocracy. From Greg Mankiw, a reminder of the words of Adam Smith:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.