Adam Smith and businessmen

One of the best know quotes from Adam Smith is

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

(Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: B.I, Ch.10, Of Wages and Profit in the Different Employments of Labour and Stock in paragraph I.10.82)

Which I had taken to be a comment on business and businessmen in general. But from Gavin Kennedy at the Adam Smith's Lost Legacy blog, I discovered that

This is often presented as Smith's general comment on business. It was, in fact, a reference to the incorporated towns where the members of each ‘trade’ – clockmakers, mechanics, drapers, weavers, butchers, printers, carriage makers, wheel makers, bakers, builders, metalworkers, and such like and so on, held a local monopoly over the sale of their designated products and prevented, legally, anybody not a member from setting up their business. It was major remnant of the old Guilds of the time, and choked competition such that members of different trades agreed not to buy from other sources, such as in nearby towns or imports, and thereby paid higher prices, but kept out competition which was a mutual benefit to all of them - but, alas, not their consumers.