FDA Approval Process For Government Programs

I’m trying to imagine what it would be like if government policy had to pass and FDA-like bureaucracy, being tested for “efficacy and safety.” Please demonstrate to the satisfaction of the panel that a tweak to the minimum wage (or *any* minimum wage, or any restriction at all on labor contracts for that matter), or a new regulation or subsidy on health care, or a change to entitlement programs, will be “effective” in the sense of achieving its intended benefits and “safe” in the sense of having acceptable costs and side-effects. This would be a much smaller government, one that is much more constrained to doing *only* those things that are legitimate functions of government.  Some of these policies are *literally* medicine. Health care policy is explicitly aimed at improving health measures in some way. In this upside-down world, this kind of medicine is shoved down your throat against your will *without* any kind of vetting procedure, while you are forbidden from taking medicine (pharmaceuticals and other chemical substances) that you actually want to take unless it passes muster with the FDA. This is backwards. The standard for medicine that we’re compelled to take against our will should be higher, not lower.

In fact, forget for a moment about the actual testing for safety and efficacy. Suppose someone proposing one of these social engineering experiments (a.k.a. “legislation”) had to get his proposal past and ethics panel, just as researchers conducting experiments on animals and humans need to do. “Suspected or likely side effects of your proposal include involuntary job loss, reduction of total productivity…benefits are highly speculative. I’m sorry, it would simply be unconscionable to test this ‘medicine’ on unwilling subjects. Denied.” I could understand someone arguing that we just gotta have pollution control, or we just gotta have military defense. Having no policy at all regarding these problems may be just as unethical as having some slightly misguided policy, so there's no moral trump card with which to simply halt all government activity. But most of what the government does is some kind of sinister social engineering, attempting to steer us toward someone's vision of a great society and away from the paths we would choose for ourselves. There are entire categories of government meddling and regulation that don't need to exist at all, most of which almost certainly wouldn't pass the hypothetical ethics panel.