A few cases come to mind.

1. The government froze wages in WW2, and companies got around that by offering free health insurance.

2. Unions often got the government to force workers to join the union, because otherwise workers would undercut the union.

3. There were numerous attempts to fix wages of black laborers artificially low after the Civil War, they would constantly fall apart because individual farmers would pay more under the table to attract better workers. See "The Strange Career of Jim Crow".

4. Government "price supports" are there because of the consistent failure of farmers to voluntarily comply with price fixing agreements.

Yes, there is a large amount of recorded history of attempted price fixing from 1830 > 1920x or so, and the results of such efforts. Given it wasn't illegal for the most part, companies & individuals didn't work very hard to hide their schemes from the history books (although sometimes from competitors). The efforts tended to be constantly in flux, subject to rapid shifts in loyalty and dedication, and the agreements were typically without any formal contractual requirement. There are numerous excellent economic accounts of the 19th century US market that covers this, and many good books for companies and persons that do so as well (eg covering the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Vanderbilts, Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Carnegie, and on it goes).

While I at the moment can not give all the referneces. One thing we know is true, is that there is a far greater amount of monopoly or cartel created by goverment then by market.

If you look long enougth you can find some cartels and monopolys that are stable for some time. Even when most of these where not able to really raise prices where far.

If you look at goverment enforcment of cartel and monopolys you will find a unbelivable amount. If you add tarrifs to that (ie blocking import of steel from japan). You will find that regulation far more often helps big buissness.

This is what people dont understand about free marketers. I do not belive that it is impossible for goverment action to imporove short run and maybe even long run conditions, but I belive it is far more like that this power is misused.

So yes you can go out of your way and figure out some asymetiric cost for whatever groupe you like. You can then go on and argue that in order to rebalance this the state needs to do 'something' (perfeclty show in the thread by all the people point out that employes can easly switch jobs and therefore there wage is below equillibrum). Stigliz for the win. This all works out great in theory but runs flat against a wall in practice. When it does run against a wall its of course just because of 'republicans' blocking all sencible policy or whatever.

So this is the reason for free market views, it is not as some people seam to belive that 'the free market is always perfect'.