Politics and policy are indeed connected, as is the word police. C is often Ts in many european languages.

It's really a form of protocol engineering, the social order protocol, you might call it.

How do you find a way, with the lowest cost, and the least disruption, to eliminate criminal behaviour - that is, activity that can only be stopped if the motivations for it are eliminated.

Politicians usually opt for "moderate" compromises that in a game theory analysis would be the opposite of the best move. The Cobra Effect is an example of one of the most famous examples of imposing order creating more chaos than the problem itself.

Policies should be a matter of engineering, and then you could call it political engineering. People even mistake the statutes of governments for being the correct way to uphold the informal (but to average joe) contract that the law should have a specified effect, and there is rarely any deep discussion about amending the rule by simplifying it, always to add more and more and more exceptions until it takes an army of lawyers to map out the loopholes.

That's why the number of laws that everyone must agree on should only be tiny. Ten was a good number. Any other decree should be ruled invalid if it substantially contradicts the base rules.

Engineering.

There is no place for rhetoric in engineering, nor for ranking intent above results.