Exactly. Compare that to privately held corporations, which would never think to illegally keep prices up through collaboration, just because they can reasonably expect to get away with it. /s

So it’s either or? Both can’t be right? Geez. Straw man much?

well you can either be state-sponsored or not. if GP is bringing up state-sponsoring as a supposed source of irrationality then yeah I'm assuming that they presume privately held corporations would do better.

that being said, I do admit my post was sarcastic, but it also did mention what the problem here is (besides a much broader discussion about captialism) which is that they can rationally expect to get away with this. State-sponsored ones because their interests are the national interest (to an extent) and privately held ones because they're usually able to effectively capture their regulators.