If a medical professional tells you that you shouldn't smoke and that it's bad for you, but are smokers themselves, are they wrong? Should you not follow them?
Calling someone a hypocrite (which is essentially what you are doing) is a specious reasoning:
In the case of a doctor that tells me smoking is bad even though they smoke, I’m more likely to believe them because they have first hand experience even if they don’t follow their own advice. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to not follow your own advice especially from the point of view that they would follow their own advice if they could and are open about that. In fact there have been numerous smokers in my life who have told me they’re addicted and recommended to me to never start and I did heed their advice.
But that’s not what happened in grade school so I’m not exactly sure what point you are making.
Do you view it as a failed promise that they would represent you and that that was something that should be expected given history?
Is it a moral failing of the government person?
I suppose the confusing thing to me is that people who rail about the government, are simply complaining about the power of companies to control it.
If those sugar companies now _are_ the government (after they've taken it over, as you say), the question becomes: do you like those sugar companies? Do you trust them?
There are some elites that are self sacrificial and view other Americans as countrymen and not units to extract from but they are very few. As somebody who rails about the government, it's fundamentally an elite problem. You can propose any system you want, but if those running it are rotten it's not going to work.
This is a baseless assertion with no evidence, written in an emotionally manipulative manner ("the confusing thing", "I'm curious", etc).
The government is responsible for drafting laws and regulations, and for setting nutritional standards. Not companies. This is a fact.
If a government official decides to claim that sugar is ok and fat is bad, that's something they have to take responsibility for given that they are literally doing so as a representative of the government.
The sugar industry is not mind-controlling these government employees. They are being corrupted, yes, but ultimately they are making the decisions. The primary moral failing is with the individuals making the decisions. This is factual. If you make a decision, you are more responsible for that decision than someone else who did not make it, by definition.
None of this is to say that this bribery and corruption on the part of the companies is somehow excusable or doesn't make the problem worse, just that the primary responsibility lies with our elected officials and those they then nominate and hire in turn.
This is almost never actually stated in comments on HN. This is statement is just projection and/or inventing hypothetical strawman positions.
These days I consider our governance to be oligopolistic corporatism where the government is a corrupted tool of the corporations that mainly exists to keep the peace between the corporations so they can more effectively extract monopolistic rents. I do like the idea of a hypothetical ideal of an uncorrupted government but I have no idea how such a government could be achieved and worry that attempts to achieve this could easily backfire and make things worse.
Edit: I consider the attempts to pin all ills on government to be the result of yet another successful public relations campaign by large corporations. Unfortunately society has been polarized to the point that I don’t have a political home with either the left or the right - and again I think this is an intentional conspiracy to undermine effective opposition.