They found a nice workaround with federal taxation though. There's a lot of instances where the states technically have the power to pass different laws than what's federally blessed. However, they'll lose federal funding if they do. And the majority of the time, that's just not a good trade-off.

So the federal government is essentially taxing the state's citizens, then giving some amount of it back to the states in exchange for rowing the boat in the right direction. States that increase their own taxes to compensate for refusal of federal funds would become noncompetitive to other states who don't.

The economy turns out to be a pretty big deal, and Commerce Clause aside, states by design have little leverage over it: their borders being open, capital can always just head next door. Small federal government is basically equivalent to right-libertarian economic policy. In an alternate universe you might see liberals content to build welfare states at state level, but in this one it's not really an option.

The framers were well before the Industrial Revolution; if they intended a right-libertarian bias, the economy they wanted unchecked was a smaller and tamer beast than this one. But anyway, they did give us the Commerce Clause.