re: Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen's platform is VERY appealing.

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Without a welfare state, wages are based entirely on labor supply and demand. People migrate purely based on economic prospects. As wages go down, the incentive to immigrate to the United States declines as well, resulting in fewer immigrants. If wages decline too much, people will emigrate elsewhere. Otherwise, you are just creating disparities which result in an illicit jobs and immigration market.

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The problem with that (and many libertarian ideals) is that it ignores the bigger picture—in this case the fact that with border and trade barriers in place, the US is more of a closed system. We open everything up and we are a wide open system, and when water seeks it's own level like you described our system has no where to go but down, because we're already so far above so many of the systems that people would immigrate from.

In other words, working for $6 an hour is o.k. with people from Guatemala. They'll pile 12 people in a 2 bedroom apartment, split expenses, and send that $6 an hour back to G-Town and STILL have a higher standard of living than they would back there. Not so for Americans. When the labor market gets flooded here—and it wouldn't just be low-wage earners if we had completely open borders; you'd have skilled laborers and professionals coming over if that happened—our wages have no place to go but down. Economic disaster.

Not to mention the even bigger disaster it would be if we maintained the welfare state with open borders, and I don't see a viable way to get rid of it, for a couple of reasons.

Libertarianism sounds great philosophically. I was a card carrying member in my 20s and into my 30s, but eventually I figured out that many of the planks in the platform simply wouldn't work if we tried them in the real world.