Theopraxis

I would suggest that you read Mark Twain's "The Gilded Age". It encapsulates what was and is wrong -- not so much with our federal government qua-government -- with the people we put into government and how they get that way. We have fostered a culture of self-service and self-interest over one of public service and public interest. No law or act, however honestly conceived in promoting the welfare of the nation and its sovereign people, escapes being twisted and manipulated for private or moneyed groups interest and profit (or at least denying profit to their competitors). The problem is only exaggerated at the state level because unlike the federal government states can't print money to cover their too often abandonment of the welfare of their people in favor of enriching the rich. They are, even more than the federal government, subject to dominance by the connected and economically dominant. For instance the separate states had the option of abolishing slavery but of course none did because they each were dominated locally by those individuals and groups that reaped huge profits from the enslavement of other human beings. The same went for Jim Crow. Separately the states had the option of stamping out segregation and the economic discrimination that blacks faced especially in the South.  Why didn’t they?  Because it ran against the economic benefits that the connected and powerful derived from Jim Crow.  In both instances it took the weight of the federal government to effect change for the welfare of the people and the nation.  Extending your logic do you think for instance that Mississippi (The poorest state in the Union) can police its own environmental welfare as effectively as the EPA (at least when the Republicons allow it to do its work)?  What you are suggesting is promoting a system of massively wasteful innefficiency by instituting a system of 50 duplications of effort and government.  In effect you suggest the massive expansion of state government to fill the void by the kind of federal non-government you would like to institute.  Your scheme would bankrupt already imperiled state governments.  It is a little too evident that your suggested medicine for our ills would be fatal.