it's an order of magnitude easier to replace a single politician with someone who'll vote for laws with teeth than it is to expect [the voluntary market forces to work]

In theory, I could agree with the above. In practice, the politicians in the US are bought and paid for, largely with corporate money. (How else does one explain the DMCA?) Laws on the books, with teeth or otherwise, are no guarantee against wrongdoing by companies - see the ongoing ForclosureGate crap as an example of fraud and felonies of all stripes, with nary a cop in sight.

To the extent that US commerce remains free and voluntary, customers made aware of undesirable business practices divert their business away from the company in question to one extent or another. Absent government-granted and enforced monopolies, competitors will spring up to capture the alienated customers' business.

History is replete with examples of government's failure to replace free markets with government control/regulation.

Actually, regulation does not do anything to prevent a company from putting melanine or floor sweepings in their products - such activities have occurred while government regulations were in place to prevent such things.

The behavior of participants within a free market will not prevent such happenings, either, but the resulting consequences can destroy such a company, through lawsuits to cover poisoned customers and loss of business from new and previous customers, and rightly so. As it currently stands, if a company is caught defrauding its customers, perhaps by poisoning its products, the government forces it to pay a small fine (relative to the costs of the gains made by the fraud) and recall existing poisoned product. That's no solution - that's viewed as a cost of business!

The biggest obstacle preventing such free market behavior is the government itself, at various levels, that grant and enforce monopolies that have no good reason to exist. This sort of meddling is becoming ever more prevalent, most recently with the passage of US Senate bill S-510 (and potentially its House counterpart) that raises the barrier for food production to such heights that only a small handful of mega companies can afford to meet them, thus in essence granting and enforcing yet another monopoly at the expense of a voluntary and free market.

Government still is the problem.

Currency has nothing to do with "user experience".

With the advent of the open beta of Mechwarrior Living Legends, the "official" games may well be eclipsed by a fan-made total conversion mod for Crysis/Crysis Warhead. MWLL features, among other cool things, combined arms: air, mechs, infantry, and tanks are all playable and useful on the battlefield.