> it's continually implied the problem is merely that we're not following their simplistic prescriptions well enough
Is this wrong? America was founded to be a federal republic composed of sovereign states sharing their power with a small central government with clearly delineated powers; now we have a massive central government that takes in two-thirds of all taxation[0] and spends 38.5% of GDP as of last count[1], and somehow decided that it had the authority to regulate a farmer growing feed for his own animals[2].
It seems like the weak central government model ceased to function around the 20th Century doesn't it? It was (and to some extent continues to be) a time of cold and hot conflict between superpowers, and a small government seems antithetical to superpower.
That’s not what the third continental congress that cobbled together our constitution said or thought.
Your small confederacy was what the Articles of Confederation had wrought and it lasted all of a decade. States rapidly enacted laws against their fellow states, it was a mess. We had religious laws, not a good scene.
Basically you should read
A) the US Constitution
B) historical accounts of the third continental congress
There is a huge difference between the federal government stepping in to regulate/mediate between states that cannot agree amongst themselves, and the federal government asserting authority to regulate activities within a single state or within multiple states that can agree amongst themselves.
Yes - analysis of "just follow the rules harder" is generally wrong, which is why we've moved on to blameless postmortems. I agree with your criticism of the current state of the system. The problem is the lack of mechanisms that encourage convergence towards the desired state. Without them, divergence continually adds up, creating the well known ratchet effect. If Filburn itself had been decided differently, the Supreme Court would have eventually justified the federal government power grab at a later time. Slower progression would mean we'd be in a better state today, but we'd still be headed towards the same place.