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People vary on whether this is actually a good thing, but enforce certain rights, e.g minimum wage, abortion legality, no slavery, etc.
There are benefits to having a national system in certain areas like healthcare, postal services, highway construction, etc. where it'd be very awkward for each state to need to find a way to individually interface with each other, although the US federal government is dysfunctional enough it doesn't always see benefits.
Well I think that minimum wage is pretty obviously a bad thing (as we have unfortunately been forced to see demonstrated in real life as "living wages" have immediately meant "rent increase and dozen eggs is now $7."
Slavery is done. The laws were passed 150 years ago, and we don't need a bunch of busybody congressman in Washington there to make sure nobody tries to bring it back.
Abortion "legality" is an excellent example of the type of vote pandering by societal destruction that I want the government to stop doing.
I'd love to hear these articulated. To go point by point:
Healtchare: What is the federal government doing WRT healthcare that is in any way beneficial to me? They create a system where I have to waste hours of my time and hundreds of dollars to get simple things like antibiotics, and yet mail out safe crack smoking kits to drug addicts to make it easier for them to live in tents in the street and do crack. I would like the federal government to FUCK OFF of my healthcare, please and thank you.
Postal service: the USPS is a great idea. In practice, it is a box in my driveway where a guy delivers trash every day that piles up on my kitchen table and eventually gets moved to another box on the driveway where another guy comes and picks it up. I see absolutely NO downside to replacing the USPS with UPS and FedEx and would LOVE it if mailing me something cost a minimum of $5.
Highway construction - highway funds are used as leverage to get states to implement ridiculous, unpopular federal policies. No I don't agree that this is a good thing. If the federal government wanted to work on absolutely mundane boring things like writing regulations around how wide an interstate highway lane should be, then great. Stealing my money to give it to Pete Buttigieg so that he can use it to pre-campaign for president by flying around the country and "giving" this money to various state infrastructure projects feels comically corrupt and horrific. No.
Nobody has pointed out what I think is the biggest benefit, which is the U.S. Dollar. Backed by the Federal Reserve, it's the most reliable financial instrument that exists, and the citizens of the U.S. as well as the rest of the world have benefited substantially by this arrangement. It has its downsides as well, of course, and is not worth an unlimited amount of tyranny.
Okay the dollars is a good one! In fact I would say: I'm frustrated at the current state of the federal government because they're putting the stability of the dollar at risk.
I have the opposite concern actually, that I increasingly feel that the federal government is pressuring me to accept policies that I don't care for and don't really approve of, because it's financially good for the bank that we call the U.S. Government and its many executives.
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