> You as an individual can stop using a corporation's products way more easily than you as an individual can vote out a government. My personal success with voting out governments is zero, but my success in boycotting corporations is pretty high.
That presumes your main interaction with a corporation is by the consumption of its products as a customer. However, that's so often not the case that it might as well be assumed to be false. For instance, you can't boycott Equifax or an industrial chemicals factory that's polluting the air in your city because you're not their customer, but you're still affected by their decisions and rules.
The main difference between a government and a corporation setting the rules is that, in democracies, the government is theoretically accountable to the interests of all citizens while the corporation is only accountable to the interests of its shareholders and (depending on market conditions) its customers.
In this (and many other) cases, government is a far more effective lever for change.
On the other hand, your vote for those politicians has near-zero effect. And if it does have an effect and they ban HFCS, then you've just imposed your will on people who wanted cheap sweeteners more than they wanted to avoid the health consequences of HCFS.
If you say so. Are they able to avoid plastic waste, palm oil, and soy-based products? How many hoops should consumers have to jump through before we are allowed to have a healthy market?
> On the other hand, your vote for those politicians has near-zero effect.
Says you. I know a bunch of people who have healthcare because we voted for a certain President and a Congress who could get it done. It had a near-100 effect for all of those people.
> And if it does have an effect and they ban HFCS, then you've just imposed your will on people who wanted cheap sweeteners more than they wanted to avoid the health consequences of HFCS.
I'm not a Republican, I don't care about corporate profits over human well-being. Removing HCFS and similar products from the market is a net good. We already decided that tobacco products should be handled this way, and HFCS specifically is just as unhealthy.
Furthermore, the product choices available to ME are severely distorted by the presence of subsidized, unhealthy corn syrup. By removing it from the market, the American people will get better choices, with minimal medium or long term disruption to the number of choices available.
Individual choice is of almost no help in managing the problem.
But they are what we have to work with. To me it is irrational to refuse to use part of the toolkit (laws and regulation) because ideology.
Mandatory radical transparency is probably a part of any effective mitigation strategy.
We have to be realistic. The “system” cannot be perfected, and trying will cause horrible unintended consequences. It will always be gamed. There will always be charismatic sociopaths and selfish assholes. There will always be injustice and suffering.
But we can try to use the available tools judiciously to keep their negative impact down to an acceptable level.
This isn't even close to an apples-to-apples comparison. You interact with many more corporations than governments. Most of the corporations you interact with have some competition; most of the governments you interact with don't. And voting out a government is hardly the analogue of boycotting a corporation: what's your success rate with voting at all vs your success rate in getting a corporation's board replaced?
All I'm saying is it can be done, and it needn't be all or nothing: one can proceed in whichever increments make the most sense.