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It is a common myth around here that the Constitution was written to reduce federal power when it was written to reduce STATE power and increase federal. Almost all the limitations within the Constitution are placed upon the States.

Forgive me, but that's insane. If they really believed that they certainly wouldn't have carried on about large government being dangerous in all their writings. You're going to have to come up with some hard proof on that before I'll even consider it.

Right, and wrong. The Founders did have to reel in the individual states from being too rambunctious. Too rambunctious to the point of VA and MD having at with musketry and canons over who got to fish near the mouth of the Potomac.

However, I tend to believe The Civil War and The Great Depression both became opportunities for strong centralization of governmental power. This led us to change our mindset and ideology to the point where we wanted the Feds to nanny us too much. That's how we became the DCSSR (District of Columbia Soviet Socialist Republic) that we are in so many ways today.

Apparently you have not studied the era prior to the calling of the Constitutional Convention when the government of the Confederation was reduced to a state of "imbecility" according to Madison and Hamilton. There are many excellent books which cover that era. It was the State governments which were endangering private property and the safety of the Union. Hamilton and Madison believed them to be a far greater danger than the federal government after all they were larger, collected more revenue, and where much more involved in the lives of the citizens.

Not only is my comment far from insane but is an indisputable fact. You may prefer "conventional wisdom" but the point is easily provable.

The Founders intended that the government not become so large as to endanger the liberties of the people but the reality of that era was that it was tiny even after the Constitution was ratified. It remained tiny until the South decided to secede. After the war it rapidly shrank again but remained larger than before.

And almost all of the Founders were Economic Nationalists.