[frithguild]

I'm not sure what your point is here. As I see it, those who enacted the Constiution were well aware that France was the Europesn economic powerhouse. Commerce flowed freely inside of its borders. At the same time, due to the Treaty if Westphalia, every jurisdiction within the Holy Roman Empire was free to impose tariffs of goods passing through their lands. Movement of goods a relatively short distance resulted in tariff payments so extensive that commerce was prevented. To prevent a similar preclusion upon the shipment of goods, the Constitution vests the power to "regulate commerce between the states" in the Congress.

I am sure we agree that once the Court began to apply made up tests, such as whether an activity had an "impact on commerce" or an "effect on commerce," the commerce clas Use became so misshapen that Congress siezed the power to prohibit growing a crop for the owner's own use, i.e. Wickard v Filburn (Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustmen Act so that it could balance the forces of supply and demand in the same manner as Soviet Russia, while the NYT suppressed its awareness of the holomodor, but I digress)

All that being said, the nature of the commerce passing over state borders, whether it be harvested crops or Amazon packages containing electronics, should really not be a salient factor.

[x]

My point was that before mass production and modern technology, transportation, and the preservation of perishables, problems like tainted meat, infected vegetables, defective vehicals, monopolistic transport, would be minor and local. There would be much less need for the federal government to play a role in interstate commerce because there would be so much less commerce and problems would be truly local. You can’t have the economy we have now and use the technology we use today and expect the federal government to be as uninvolved in commerce as it was in Jefferson’s day.

Clearly, there was interstate commerce then, or there would be no need for an interstate commerce clause, but the problem was still thought of in terms of tariffs and duties. They didn’t expect that the kind of regulation and oversight that we have now would be necessary. Today it is, and expecting every state to do its own safety regulation (or not) would introduce the kind of bottlenecks there were in the Holy Roman Empire. That doesn’t mean that everything we do is part of interstate commerce. It does mean that we were bound to have a bureaucracy larger than Jefferson’s. Maybe this was an obvious point, but I thought it needed to be made.