Saudi-led Opec Plus cartel decided to cut production by 2m barrels a day – the opposite of what Biden administration officials had pleaded with the Saudis to do. After the shock of that embarrassing announcement, which threatened to raise gas prices around the US midterm elections, Biden vowed: “There’s going to be some consequences for what they’ve done.”

I thought you liked the free market?

That classic free market system where a cartel has regular meetings to set production levels to maximise their profits.

There is nothing absolutely inconsistent between free-markets and market concentration. If by a free-market, we use the standard neoclassical meaning of one where there is no/very little/minimal government or public regulation to influence demand or supply or the price mechanism, which in material terms implies that those are completely controlled by private capital and its owners, then there is nothing stopping this from being an oligopoly, a cartel or a monopoly. Actually lack of public regulation has generally lead to more concentration, not less.

I think you are confusing the neoclassical ‘perfect competition’ (which does not, and cannot, exist in the real world) and neoclassically defined ‘free’-markets.

Please don’t try drop econ-101 learns on Marxists if you don’t know the definitions of free-market economics, perfect competition or oligopolies.

If it involves “an oligopoly, a cartel, or a monopoly” then it is not a “free market” according to what they taught me in econ 101, everything convincing that I’ve heard since, and what Adam Smith explicitly wrote down when he first described the idea. Wikipedia cites Karl Popper in saying that in classical economics a free market is one that’s “free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities,” and that it’s a market in which economic rents are minimised. A monopoly is by definition antithetical to a free market. Any neoliberal suggestions that attacking the whole concept of public regulation of markets will always make them more free are simply lies, and should not be accepted.

That there is at present little or nothing preventing any imperfectly but approximately free markets that might otherwise exist devolving into less free ones dominated by monopolies, cartels, corrupt and captured regulators, out-of-control rent seeking, frauds that rely on information asymmetry, and other such perversions is (obviously, I thought) the reason why I’ve been consistently saying that “free” markets are not something we see much of in reality.