> The point of a free market in practice is to ensure that sale values are correlated with, and reasonably close to, production costs. No, the point of a free

> The point of a free market in practice is to ensure that sale values are correlated with, and reasonably close to, production costs. No, the point of a free market is to let the price system do its thing, and prices have nothing to do with production costs as long as they are higher. If prices appear to move in unison and that actually happens to be because of collusion, in a free market a new competitor could undercut the cartel. That's assuming that the cartel members themselves don't break the collusion, which they have every incentive to. The long-term impact of collusion on prices is limited compared with e.g. money printing and other sources of inflation.