Will Obamacare succeed where term limits failed?

[Ironside]

It's businesses giving consumers what they want.

Marketing consists of three parts. The first is to show the world that you exist, the second to increase the number of people wanting your product. The third is to make them willing to pay the price you given (in particular about exclusiveness of a product). The second and third is all about manipulation.

And?

If the people behave like that without "teh guverment keeping dah man down", then why do you expect them to behave differently? To paraphrase. "This would work perfectly if people stopped acting like people." I do remember seeing this about another political system.

What on earth gave you that idea?

Your insistance that "what the consumer wants, the market provides", without acknowledging that the consumers are far from a monolithic mass, and under manipulation from the market. You also ignore that the consumers already got the powers of boycott ("but the electorate itself can't force the change?"), probably because it's too weak. And with your "new, improved" system, that's the only power.

And has the government lied or been wrong about the dangers of products in the past?

The naive paternalistic view of government that you and Husar exhibit is amusing.

A goverment doesn't have any economic reasons for lying about it. A corrupt goverment does, putting it in a similar spot as the companies already bribing them. Remove the goverment and your starting place would be the companies. Or in the best case, underfunded independant research.

My point with the aspartame question is the one of a reliable source. You can choose to be ignorant and ignore it, you can choose to do a basic read up on it, or you can dedicate at least months and probably years of studies to get a full understanding of it.
For most people, it'll be the basic read up. It's a staggering number of sites claiming that a waste product of aspartame is toxic. Bonus point is even the goverment and the producer agrees with that, but says it's a trace amount of a toxic waste we already get naturally in higher amounts. And thus we come to my point:

To be able to do a basic research, the thing 99,9% of the population shouldn't need to surpass, you'll need to be able to easily recognize the reliable sources. You have 3 basic options, the goverment, independant research and the companies. The problem with independant research is thier source of money. Without a stable, reliable source, large conditioned donations would dominate (and you can see how the mild ones look like already). And creating a stable, reliable source is pretty much taxing things already. Easier to keep it within the goverment and have the watchers monitoring that, than developing new systems that looks exactly alike.