The most important disadvantage to having centralized national policy instead of local policy is the inability to adapt to local circumstances. In any society, local regions are going to differ from one another to greater or lesser degree, and if their needs differ strongly enough, national policies that are one-size-fits-all could be ineffective or harmful.
A good example of this is minimum wage. Prices vary substantially between different regions within any large country; for example prices in San Francisco are much higher than prices in rural Tennessee. A federal minimum wage that is fixed at a nominal dollar figure like $10 or $15 could have very different effects in those two places; in San Francisco it might be beneficial in helping people afford the high prices, or not even matter because wages are already above that level, while in Tennessee it could be harmful as it requires paying unreasonably high real wages in some industries.
It is sometimes possible to design federal policies that work around this problem (in this case, you could set a minimum wage at purchasing power parity), but often a better solution is simply to allow local governments to make their own decisions on certain issues.
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