Chocolate Price-Fixing

Oh, how many times have we seen these exercises in futility by the government?

"...While a hobby chef could buy the ingredients and make an exotic chocolate delicacy at home, it actually costs less to buy readymade chocolate candy from a retail store. This is the result of buying the ingredients in massive quantities and producing the end product using organized mass-production, combining mechanization with the efficient division of labour and economies of scale. It is this end of the chocolate market that has become the target of collusion and price fixing, not the top end of the highly-priced, specialty chocolate market that is open to competition from hobby chefs.
Yet the news media actually chose to report a story in early June about three Canadian companies colluding to fix the price of chocolate, with the possibility that Canada’s Competition Bureau may actually investigate the allegations. Given the ridiculous nature of the story, it may have been more appropriate to broadcast the allegations on April 1st. But now the nation may witness an even more ridiculous spectacle of an “at arm’s length” government agency actually launching an investigation into the allegations. Who is going to cover the cost of this farce? The taxpayer, of course.
From a free-market perspective, the three colluding companies would have only played into the hands of their unregulated competitors had they actually colluded to fix the price of chocolate candy. Only a monopoly player that is free from unregulated competition could ever successfully engage in price fixing. And only a government could ever assure such freedom from competition. Canada’s Competition Bureau is powerless to investigate government-regulated monopolies that are the turf of the marketing agencies, agencies that get “captured” by the industries they regulate. So the Competition Bureau is left to investigate chocolate price fixing."