In turn, this made me pause again and consider the whole construct we call "Capitalism," and how lots of apologists for the Capitalist system like to point out that it is a "FREE" market system, and that it is an "efficient" market system because buyers and sellers are free to set the market price.

Something smells a little "off" about that...

In todays world (and for a couple of hundred years past), it is off, becuse it's not free markets, just the illusion of them.

Central banking in collusion with government regulation, STOP the free market principal, and if done correctly - from their point of view - it's the 'slowly the boiling frog' dynamic. Wealth extraction from the labor of others is the ultimate goal (for them) .

The reason we have the likes of Wal-Mart and Amazon... and they are pretty much putting individual entrepreneurs out of business is precisely that they grow monopolistically large by employing automated economies of scale individual operators simply cannot compete with.

They're in collusion with governments. Monopolies are a symptom of this corruption.
No free market can exist in such conditions. It's the opposite of free markets.

Monopolies will not exist in a true free market.
'Economies of scale', while true to a point, is also untue.
As the bureaucracy increases within a company (unproductive labor), so does inefficiencies - thus leaving the market open to other competitors without the 'bureaucracy baggage'

It's only government regulations that allow the companies to become monopolies.
Regulations increase the 'barrier to entry' off smaller competitors, thus disincentivizing them - or even making it impossible to compete.