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The first and biggest boon the federal government brings us is uniform federal laws. In a republic with minimal federation interstate laws could become disparate enough to cause logistical and commercial problems. As a really nonsensical hypothetical, MN, IA, MO, AR, and LA could band together and say "it's illegal to ship goods through our state without paying an interstate transit fee", and theres no way around them on the ground without crossing into Canada. The federal government stops this nonsense from happening.
More realistically in a world without federal regulation state regs would be a giant mess and we would lose tons of efficiency to having a million little x state to y state compliance experts and all the insane bureaucracy that would come with it. It would be way less profitable to sell stuff to americans if shipping stuff had 50 different sets of rules.
I also think that having some uniformity in laws helps keep America from polarizing to an actual national divorce level. If california can make wholistic veganism mandatory and texas can outlaw saying the word vegetarian, we really might start living in our own corners and not seeing eachother as at all similar. National identity is essentially a federal IP.
Most of that nonsense happens anyway. Look into the significant complexity for direct-to-consumer interstate (ecommerce) alcohol sales. Combine the classic sales tax layered regime (which is already much more complicated post South Dakota v. Wayfair) down to municipal levels with fun state/county/municipal regulations like limiting how much of certain types of alcohol can be delivered to a given address in a calendar year (book keeping with indexing based on addresses rather than accounts and hope nothing is missed because of semantically equivalent but literally different street names). On the other end of the spectrum is the influence of things like CARB on the national vehicle market because of CAA waivers that in practice once granted by a friendly administration cannot be revoked by a later hostile one or at least have not been given the ability for lawsuits to hold up the revocation until the hostile one is replaced (8 years at the longest) by a friendly one. In practice California in particular has leveraged its population and economy to influence or de facto regulate national commerce and the 9th circuit has played along with SCOTUS typically denying cert. They did grant cert in National Pork Producers v. Ross so that may change. It is much less profitable on a per-unit basis scaling up to cross state lines or go national, but that very barrier to entry becomes a major competitive advantage for larger businesses that have already invested in compliance. There is also a small but thriving market in companies that sell compliance-as-a-service.
oh man, i am aware of and annoyed by how alcohol distribution is set up. Idunno if its national or just some states but where i'm at, a brewery HAS to sell to a licensed distributor and not directly to a customer, which prettymuch ruins any comparison to a free market. Anyway, i think the difficulties with alcohol shipping is a pretty good indicator that federal regulation can bring a uniformity that is preferable to each state having bespoke rules. Like, as bad as things are now, without federal regulation that small but thriving compliance sector would become a ubiquitous and heavy player in interstate commerce.
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