> The way the country was set up, the laws that affect you are supposed to be made at as local of a level as possible That's not really true. The various state

> The way the country was set up, the laws that affect you are supposed to be made at as local of a level as possible That's not really true. The various states are (and always have been) unitary states from a political governance perspective. As expressed in modern jurisprudence, the majority of states are Dillon Rule states: states where local governments are purely creatures of the state government, and whose powers (or even existence) can be expanded or abrogated at the sole pleasure of the state. > and the federal government exists solely to pass laws that affect the entire country, about matters that the states can't handle themselves the way they want, and it's supposed to still be kept as minimal/small as possible. This is somewhat more true, but it's still a pretty poor reflection. Recall that the US Constitution was not the first form of government the US had: it was a response to the issues with the Articles of Confederation, which had the "federal" government as much, much weaker. It's not even fair to call the US a federal government at that point; the notion of a federal state--two levels of government, each with their own, independent locus of power not derived from the pleasure of the other--was more or less created from scratch for the Constitution. The Constitution does limit the powers of the federal government to, broadly speaking, two areas, with a third later being developed via amendments. These are international affairs (both in treaty making and military developments) and commercial regulation, with enforcement of civil rights later coming into play. Now, it's the case that things like the EPA or FDA aren't mentioned by the Constitution, but that kind of regulatory authority just didn't exist when it was written, and the existing grants of commercial regulation strongly suggest that it is intended for the federal government to have that regulatory authority to provide a single, integrated market among the several states of the union.