It goes almost without exception, that monopolies are to be avoided at all costs, except when it comes to those things such as governmental controlled public utilities, such as in regards to water, sewage, and electricity, which thereby necessitates governmental regulation as compared to having instead multiple sources of public water, sewage, and electricity. The reason why monopolies have no place in private enterprise, is that any company that is the sole source of a product that is vital and needed, have therefore the power to price it any way that it so desires or even to withhold it, per their volition. In regards to cartels, such as in OPEC, they basically have seen the virtue of colluding together so as to control the volume and ready availability of a highly valued energy resource, thereupon providing them with important pricing strength, along with protecting themselves from undercutting one another, so as to avoid suffering a race to the proverbial bottom. That said, cartels in western nations, are illegal and are just as insidious as any monopoly, for basically what is occurring is that those that should be fairly competing against one another, have seen the sensible value of cooperating one with another, instead; in order, therefore, to extract extra profit and money from those that are their customers.
The thing about public corporations is that the stock market is extremely unforgiving of all those corporations that do not show both consistent growth in revenue as well as in profit; so not too surprisingly, in consideration that the upper management of these corporations, typically have a sizeable portion of their actual compensation tied to the performance of the stock along with its corresponding profits, then those that are not of good moral character, or prone to taking shortcuts, are going to find the temptation of colluding with those that they compete with, so as to thereby create a formal or informal cartel will, in fact, be taken under serious consideration. In actuality, as much as these massive corporate behemoths speak of how much they admire and appreciate the capitalistic market, a significant portion of them, don’t really want to compete, at all; they just want to make consistent money, more than anything, and in order to do that, the variance and the dangers of true competition must be subdued and thereby controlled to their benefit.
So then, cartels and monopolies are the antithesis of what capitalism is supposed to be, and anytime that the government, of, for, and by the people is the enabler of this very thing, wittingly or unwittingly, then it is the general public that is invariably shorn of their wages through these cartels and monopolies, again and again. The thing is that it doesn’t really take any great detective work by governmental regulators to know when collusion is going on, for the evidence of such is usually pretty darn clear; so, the fact that the government does nothing about it, whatsoever, more times than not, reflects that those that are meant to protect and to do right by the general public, have for all practical purposes, been co-opted by or are in collusion with our present-day cartels and monopolies.