The government can, and does, force companies to produce products all the time, and that isn't always a bad thing. The government forced auto makers to use safety glass, for example, by the simple expedient of making it illegal to sell cars without it. And as far as I can tell, the benefits of doing so far outweighed the additional costs associated with government interference in the free market. I'd rather not go back to the days before safety glass, when even a half-way serious accident could end up with someone being decapitated by a flying knife of broken glass.
You are confusing apples an oranges, making them comply with safety regs is not telling them to build a car to their specs...yet. As govt grows larger the way govt functions begins to change and we are seeing that change in our govt today. What the govt is doing is moving from results to process.
Stating that 'Safety Glass' is required is results based. This commonly how efficient organizations functions and trust me, if you ever worked for me you would understand results based management. In short come to work when you want to, take as long for lunch as you want, prefer to work in the eve rather than mornings fine by me. That said you must work as a team member, your contemporaries will inform me whether you do or not, if you are a programmer then I expect X lines of executable code per week. If you can't work as a team member, you fail to produce the required code to the standard I set then you tenure here will be short...any questions.
As govt gets larger and larger the means (process) begins to justify the ends. Dimmy Carter created the Dept of Energy with the express job of creating a national energy plan and managing such. To this day they have failed to do any of it, yet last I looked they had 16,000+ employees and a $25+ BILLION budget I suspect they are larger and have a bigger budget now. They are all process, no results, no standards.
If you want to really look into this then look at the USSR and their take over of all products and output, you might note their Epic Fail.
So you can expect our govt to do same. It will progress from all cars must have safety glass to all safety glass will be x thick, x length, x height, x color, all cars will use same same, all cars black and you must employ 25% black workers and every other year you must have a black CEO etc etc etc...