Monty I sorry but your quote of the General Welfare clause is utter ignorance.

I don’t blame you but your educators. You should demand a refund.

What the General Welfare was referring to was All in common, or all alike. That no act should be for the benefit of a select group or state but for the good of all alike.

You obviously are not familiar with James Madison’s address to congress over the Cod Fisheries Act, else you would know that he berated them for doing what 20th and 21st century government has done.

Another word there that may through you is Regulate. To the founding generation it meant To keep Regular or Well Supplied.

As to the Interstate Commerce clause and Marshal’s decision to give it the broadest interpretation possible, there were absolutely no constitutional grounds to base that upon and it was flatly ignored until the 20th century.

With that out of the way you will note that there is no authority for the federal government to intervene in any way. They are even expressly forbidden to tax anything produced in any of the states.

While you may find the free market strange it was the way of doing business in the US until about 1933. Around the same time but a little later I believe some anonymous court clerk inserted into a finding by the Supreme Court that economic liberty was no longer seen as an individual right and was not for further review. Rather insidious in my opinion.

As I said before it was the industrialists cries of Over Production, and a goodly bit of money, that brought about the first regulatory moves. There was a great deal of admiration of what the Fascist governments in Europe had accomplished and they sought to emulate it, to a degree.

The Regulatory State in the US did not begin until 1946 IIRC. That took several decades to have a serious impact.

There are some moves afoot in some states to push back against some of the regulation, though I don’t have a catalogue of them or what they are about.

If you are in dire fear of competition I suppose you also fear meritocracy, innovation, and anything else out of the box. Sorry if you think freedom is scary.