Those fricken capitalists will tell you (even when all things prove otherwise) that the invisible hand of the market keeps corruption from happening because if a merchant keeps his thumb on the scale then people will shop elsewhere.

Except, we don’t live in tiny hamlets where the guy who grows the tomatoes is the same guy selling the tomatoes at the public market. Word of mouth on consumer goods doesn’t actually work in a global market where prices are set long before goods get to the supermarket and you can’t go spy on your neighbors farm to see if he’s trying to sell meat from downer cows.

Case in point: a New Jersey man is now facing jail time for price fixing canned tomatoes. The dude basically bribed wholesale buyers’ reps into paying more for goods and buying from his company exclusively.

But how can we regular people know that the price of tomatoes went up because some asswipes were making a personal profit shafting us? We can’t be at the canning factory meetings. We aren’t privy to the buyer’s luncheons where sellers woo clients with cash bribes. We just go to the grocery store and discover that canned spaghetti sauce is now twice as expensive.

And this doesn’t just apply to tomatoes. It applies to oil and plywood and health care. Think about that the next time some libertarian fuckwad bitches about government interference. And then offer him a lovely salad of downer cow beef carpaccio and ecoli spinach with price fixed beefsteak tomatoes. When he ends up in the hospital and his insurance has decided it wasn’t enough of an emergency situation to warrant their paying for the out of network fees, ask him how that invisible hand is working for him.