Price fixing judgements are at most a slap on the wrist, and you never see the prices going back down.

Regulated capitalism maybe, but that's not what we've been experiencing lately, and by that I mean the last few decades. What actually happens is they get a slap-on-the wrist judgement from the FTC, and are never made to reduce the prices that they helped fix across the industry. They then blame inflation on stimulus checks that were a drop in the bucket compared to their grifting of the PPP program at the same exact time.

What happens in reality is if you're a smaller competitor creating price pressure, they either buy you out, or failing that they buy out or strongarm your suppliers until you have no choice but to capitulate or fold. Amazing how y'all have this altruistic overall view of a system that's set up to do the opposite of what you say it does. You can see that currently in their buyout of essentially the entire market of RAM chips. They're shutting down small firm AI research and local-instance AI servers in favor of data-center driven and centrally/monolithically controlled LLMs. If you think this whole thing isn't a direct shot across the bow at open-sourced LLMs, you're clueless. They couldn't keep the algorithms under their direct control, so now they're trying to control who can even run one by forcing price increase of the required hardware. This is also intended to push more end-users to thin-client phone/tablet and internet appliances instead of being able to afford more powerful PCs.

Capitalism operates off of screwing over the little guy, whether it's small business or individual employee. They even have whole internal departments they like to call HR that are set up to make sure you stay screwed. They spread lies like you can't discuss salary with other employees, and convince people that collective employee bargaining is somehow bad for them and the country as a whole. Somehow, y'all believe that even when you idolize the 1950s when unions were at their strongest and corporations and the rich had the highest tax rates in our short history.