Building standards is actually a great example of why local matters more than national. If your town is a stickler on buildings, getting an addition built on your house might take months to get approved and built. The next town over might be laissez-faire and let people do whatever they want with minimal oversight. That's a larger influence on a day-to-day than the federal government mandating, for example, that new buildings need to have XYZ material, which gets phased in slowly and gradually, almost invisibly.