The Baseline Trap: Modern Servitude in the Age of the Provider State
Freedom and Self-Government — Part II of II
Can individuals remain free when the institutions designed to protect them progressively acquire control over their choices? From historical slavery to economic and legal dependency, bureaucratic authority, political sovereignty, and artificial (super)intelligence, this essay examines a troubling possibility: freedom may be diminished not only by explicit prohibitions, but also by systems that make independence increasingly difficult.
“You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go,
I owe my soul to the company store.”— Merle Travis, Sixteen Tons (1946). Written and originally recorded by Merle Travis; popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford (1955).
Imagine a society in which almost every important decision requires institutional mediation. Working, investing, starting a business, using property, obtaining financial services, accessing public assistance, and communicating with others all depend, to varying degrees, on rules established by organizations whose decisions individuals may struggle to challenge.
Its citizens possess legal rights. They vote, own property, travel, and make personal choices. Their freedom is formally recognized.
Yet the number of institutions capable of influencing those choices continues to grow, while the practical ability to operate independently of them may diminish.
What does freedom mean when nobody explicitly forbids us to choose, but choosing differently becomes prohibitively expensive?
This is the central question of the Baseline Trap: the possibility that protection, convenience, and institutional coordination can gradually develop into relationships of dependence that undermine the autonomy they were originally intended to support.
To understand the distinction, it is useful to begin with a far more extreme historical reality.
For much of human history, people could legally belong to other people.
Slavery existed in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and numerous other civilizations. Individuals were enslaved through conquest, birth, trade, punishment, and debt.
Nor were Europeans spared. From the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, people from Europe were captured and sold into slavery across parts of the Islamic world, including the Ottoman Empire.
Women were forced into sexual servitude as concubines, while some enslaved boys and men were abused, castrated and sold as eunuchs. Neither religious authority nor imperial grandeur made such brutality any less barbaric.
Across the Atlantic, the transatlantic slave trade established one of history’s most extensive systems of hereditary, racialized human bondage. Yet the same western civilization that helped build this system also produced the moral and political movements that would eventually challenge and dismantle it.
These historical systems of slavery differed considerably, but they shared a defining feature: the exercise of coercive power over the lives, labor, movement, and, frequently, the bodies of enslaved individuals.
Slavery has not disappeared. According to the 2022 Global Estimates published by the International Labour Organization and the International Organization for Migration, approximately 49.6 million people were living in conditions classified as modern slavery in 2021: 27.6 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage.
Forced labour takes several forms. An estimated 17.3 million people were exploited by private actors in sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, construction, services, and domestic work. Another 6.3 million were subjected to forced commercial sexual exploitation, while approximately 3.9 million endured state-imposed forced labour.
Geographically, Asia and the Pacific accounted for approximately 15.1 million victims of forced labour. The Arab States recorded the highest prevalence relative to population, at 5.3 victims per 1,000 inhabitants.
Forced commercial sexual exploitation is a particularly brutal manifestation of modern slavery. Women and girls represented approximately 78% of its 6.3 million victims. Traffickers and exploitative networks maintain control through violence, intimidation, confinement, deception, and debt bondage.
Forced marriage affected approximately 22 million people worldwide, including 14.2 million in Asia and the Pacific. Although this region accounted for nearly two-thirds of all cases, the Arab States recorded again the highest prevalence relative to population, at 4.8 victims per 1,000 inhabitants.
The victims include underage girls forced into marriages without meaningful consent, sometimes with much older men. Among those who reported the circumstances of their forced marriage, 73% identified their parents as responsible and another 16% identified other relatives.
Documented reports from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Sudan, and Yemen illustrate the persistence of child and forced marriage under conditions of patriarchal authority, family coercion, poverty, and inadequate legal protection.
In some communities, including those in Muslim-majority societies, restrictive interpretations of religious and customary norms have been invoked to justify such practices. These abuses transcend religious boundaries, and no cultural or religious tradition can justify denying individuals the freedom to refuse marriage.
These abuses cross national, cultural, and religious boundaries. What unites them is not a particular civilization but the denial of individual consent: the exercise of power over people who cannot freely refuse, leave, or determine the course of their own lives.
These are situations of genuine coercion, violence, and exploitation, in which individuals are denied the freedom to refuse or escape abusive conditions.
That distinction is essential.
The distinction between these forms of slavery and modern institutional dependency is fundamental. Poverty, taxation, public assistance, and bureaucratic restrictions do not constitute slavery, however burdensome they may become.
Yet the absence of literal enslavement does not mean that freedom cannot be progressively constrained through economic dependence, excessive regulation, and the concentration of institutional power.
The question is not whether these conditions amount to slavery, but how far they can erode an individual’s capacity for self-government.
The expression modern servitude, as used in this essay, therefore describes a different philosophical problem: the progressive restriction of meaningful individual autonomy through relationships of institutional dependence.
It is an analogy concerning power, not an attempt to redefine slavery.
The comparison must not obscure the radically different moral and legal circumstances involved.
Nevertheless, the historical experience raises a question that remains relevant beyond literal bondage: what happens when one person or institution acquires substantial authority over the decisions of another?
“Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.”
— Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), capítulo XIV. Tradução livre.
Frederick Douglass understood the relationship between choice and responsibility. His argument was grounded in the concrete experience of enslavement: denying people control over their actions also undermines the moral responsibility that presupposes freedom.
Modern institutions operate under fundamentally different conditions. Yet the general relationship between autonomy and responsibility remains important.
Institutional paternalism rests on a profound contradiction: the state treats citizens as responsible adults when demanding taxes, compliance with the law, and accountability for their actions, yet often treats those same citizens as incapable of making decisions about their own lives.
They are trusted to work, produce wealth, and finance government, but supposedly cannot be trusted to exercise independent judgment without bureaucratic supervision.
Welfare assistance programs, such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família, can reinforce institutional paternalism by making continued reliance on government support appear safer and more predictable than the uncertain pursuit of employment, professional advancement, and economic independence.
Worse still, such programs can be weaponized during elections. Politicians may portray public assistance as a personal favor from those in power rather than a right protected by transparent rules. By exploiting the fear of losing benefits, they can turn institutional dependency into political loyalty.
This political exploitation reflects a broader problem: the tendency of governments to confuse protecting citizens with directing their lives. Protecting individuals against coercion, fraud, and harm is a legitimate function of government.
But when the state presumes that adults must also be protected from the consequences of their own voluntary choices, it crosses the Rubicon from legitimate protection into institutional paternalism.
By treating independent judgment as a threat requiring constant supervision, the state does not cultivate responsible citizens; it reduces them to a docile herd, conditioned to obey, dependent on its masters, and easily manipulated at their will.
This introduces what I call the Baseline Trap.
The trap does not arise merely because an individual depends on someone else. Cooperation, specialization, employment, contracts, and social institutions necessarily generate relationships of interdependence.
Nor does every costly decision to change jobs, providers, communities, or institutions indicate a loss of freedom. Commitments naturally create obligations, and abandoning them may involve legitimate costs.
The problem becomes more serious when three conditions converge: an institution exercises concentrated power over essential decisions; leaving its complex jurisdiction or services involves exceptionally high costs or few viable alternatives; and its decisions cannot be effectively challenged through independent mechanisms.
Under these circumstances, dependency can become a form of institutional domination, even when the relationship remains formally legal.
The Baseline Trap is not dependence itself. It is dependence combined with concentrated authority, costly exit, and inadequate opportunities for contestation.
This definition applies beyond government. A corporation, employer, financial institution, professional association, or technological platform can create comparable constraints when it controls opportunities for which meaningful substitutes are unavailable.
Nevertheless, governmental authority deserves particular scrutiny because the state possesses powers that private organizations ordinarily do not: it can establish binding laws, impose taxes, regulate entry into professions and markets, and enforce its decisions through legitimate coercion.
The problem is not the existence of those powers. Modern societies require enforceable rights, predictable laws, public institutions, and mechanisms for protecting citizens against violence and fraud.
The question is how far these powers should extend.
Consider the cumulative effect of taxation, licensing, administrative requirements, and regulatory complexity.
An individual may legally own property but face extensive restrictions on its use. A qualified professional may be prevented from offering services without an authorization. An entrepreneur may possess the necessary capital and expertise yet remain unable to begin operating until numerous administrative conditions have been satisfied.
Some restrictions respond to genuine risks. Others may persist because established interests benefit from limiting competition or because administrative structures tend to preserve their own authority.
Their legitimacy cannot be established merely by pointing to their existence.
Each restriction requires a defensible purpose, a proportionate mechanism, and evidence that less intrusive alternatives would be insufficient.
The same applies to taxation. Public revenue finances institutions that can greatly expand individual freedom: courts, public security, infrastructure, education, and protection against coercion. Consequently, a higher tax burden does not automatically imply less freedom in every meaningful sense.
But neither should its cost be dismissed.
Resources transferred to government are resources individuals can no longer allocate according to their own priorities. The relevant assessment must consider both the benefits produced by public expenditure and the opportunities forgone by those financing it.
“There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.”
— Margaret Thatcher, Speech to the Conservative Party Conference, Blackpool, October 14, 1983.
A government cannot establish its legitimacy simply by demonstrating that its activities are useful. It must also justify why those activities require compulsory financing or centralized administration rather than more decentralized arrangements.
There is a further institutional difficulty.
The state may simultaneously establish the rules, collect the resources, grant authorizations, supervise compliance, administer benefits, and adjudicate disputes involving its own decisions.
These functions are not always exercised by the same institution, and constitutional safeguards may separate them. Nevertheless, their concentration within an insufficiently accountable system creates significant asymmetries of power.
The central problem is not merely how much government does, but how difficult it becomes for citizens to challenge what government does.
A state may be indispensable as the guarantor of rights while becoming dangerous when it is also the principal gatekeeper to their exercise.
Economic assistance also illustrates how the same institution can either expand or restrict practical autonomy.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.”
— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms (1993), Sam Vimes’s Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness.
In Men at Arms (1993), Terry Pratchett introduced the well-known Boots Theory. A poor man repeatedly purchases inexpensive boots because he cannot afford a durable pair. Eventually, he spends more than a wealthier person while continuing to endure inferior conditions.
The lesson concerns the cost of having limited alternatives. Poverty can force individuals into decisions that are rational in the short term but expensive over time.
Recognizing this difficulty does not require abandoning personal responsibility. It requires acknowledging that responsibility is exercised under different constraints.
Public assistance can be particularly valuable in times of crisis, preventing temporary hardship from becoming permanent deprivation. It may help individuals maintain housing, continue their education, recover from illness, or regain financial independence until they can support themselves again.
In such cases, assistance can strengthen independence.
But policy design also matters.
Suppose someone receives several income-tested benefits. An increase in earnings may trigger the simultaneous withdrawal of financial assistance, subsidies, or other entitlements. The resulting gain in disposable income may be small, and certain eligibility thresholds can even create losses.
The OECD has examined such mechanisms through indicators including unemployment traps and marginal effective tax rates.
An individual responding to these incentives may be acting entirely rationally.
The failure, where it exists, lies in the institutional design rather than in a supposed deficiency of character.
This does not mean that every recipient should eventually cease receiving assistance. Disability, chronic illness, old age, and other circumstances may justify continuing support.
The appropriate criterion is whether an institution provides necessary protection while preserving or increasing the person’s feasible alternatives.
A safety net should prevent people from falling. It should not unnecessarily make climbing out more difficult.
Legal complexity introduces another dimension of the same problem.
The purpose of law is to establish predictable rules, protect rights, resolve conflicts, and constrain arbitrary power. Yet sufficiently complicated legal systems can make the exercise of ordinary rights dependent on expensive and continuous professional assistance.
Worse still, such complexity can foster a virtually untouchable judicial caste, insulated from meaningful accountability and increasingly concerned with preserving its own authority, privileges, and institutional power. Those entrusted with administering justice risk becoming guardians of a system that serves its own perpetuation rather than the citizens it was created to protect.
The World Justice Project’s Global Insights on Access to Justice 2019, drawing on surveys of more than 100,000 people across 101 countries and jurisdictions, documented substantial difficulties in addressing everyday legal problems.
Professional legal representation is often indispensable, particularly when individuals confront powerful institutions. The concern is not the existence of lawyers or courts but an institutional environment in which exercising a recognized right becomes practically impossible without extensive financial resources or specialized knowledge.
A right that exists on paper but cannot be exercised without disproportionate cost provides incomplete protection.
Education presents a related challenge.
A society of self-governing individuals requires more than technical qualifications. It requires people capable of evaluating evidence, questioning authority, identifying manipulation, and forming independent judgments.
But educational institutions can also encourage conformity rather than intellectual autonomy. Ignorance itself can become an instrument of control: people who lack the knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary to question authority are more easily manipulated, while ideological indoctrination in schools can replace independent reasoning with obedience to prescribed beliefs.
There is a fundamental difference between teaching students how political and economic systems operate and teaching them which political conclusions they are expected to accept.
The problem is not unique to public education. Private institutions, ideological organizations, employers, and digital platforms can exert similar pressures.
Education should cultivate intellectual independence, not manufacture ideological conformity. An ignorant population is easier to govern; an indoctrinated one may no longer recognize the limits of its own freedom.
The problem of institutional dependency extends beyond individuals to the organization of federal states.
A federation is not merely a country divided into administrative territories. Its underlying purpose is to distribute political authority among communities with different histories, economic conditions, priorities, and needs. Decisions affecting everyday life should, whenever possible, be made by institutions sufficiently close to the people who experience their consequences.
A distant central government cannot possess complete knowledge of the circumstances prevailing in every state, municipality, or local community. Uniform national policies may overlook regional differences, impose inappropriate priorities, and prevent local experimentation.
Central authorities can establish common constitutional protections and coordinate matters that extend beyond regional boundaries, but these functions do not necessarily justify determining how every community should manage its own affairs.
Financial dependence can further undermine this autonomy. When regional governments retain formal responsibilities but depend heavily on conditional transfers from the central government, their constitutional powers may become increasingly difficult to exercise independently.
“We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence.”
— Jefferson Davis, July 1864, as reported by James R. Gilmore in Our Visit to Richmond (The Atlantic Monthly, September 1864).
Genuine federal autonomy requires more than formal constitutional powers: it also depends on sufficient fiscal independence and the practical ability to establish priorities without excessive reliance on conditional transfers or directives from the central government.
Centralized policies may provide national consistency. Yet excessive centralization can impose uniform solutions on fundamentally different communities, discourage local experimentation, and weaken political accountability.
Meaningful federalism requires more than the formal distribution of powers. It requires genuine local decision-making authority, sufficient fiscal autonomy, and constitutional safeguards that prevent both central and regional governments from exercising arbitrary power.
Ultimately, this brings us back to the fundamental question of self-government: who should have the authority to decide, and how can that authority be limited so that coordination does not become domination?
They are not morally equivalent concepts, but they share an underlying analytical question: does formally recognized authority translate into genuine freedom to decide, and whose freedom is being protected?
Centralization can suppress regional autonomy. Decentralization can preserve oppressive local institutions. Sovereignty can defend a population against external domination while providing no guarantee of liberty within its borders.
Consequently, political self-government has value only insofar as its institutions also respect the rights of the individuals whose lives they govern.
The same analytical framework becomes even more important when applied to modern technology.
For much of history, surveillance and administrative control were constrained by human limitations. Collecting information, monitoring behavior, maintaining records, and coordinating decisions across large populations required extensive labor and infrastructure.
Digital technologies have transformed those constraints.
Smartphones generate location and behavioral data. Financial systems record transactions. Platforms collect information about preferences and relationships. Biometric identification can be combined with extensive databases. Artificial intelligence makes it possible to classify, correlate, and analyze information on a scale that earlier administrations could scarcely imagine.
These capabilities can produce substantial benefits. They may improve medical diagnosis, detect fraud, reduce administrative delays, strengthen public safety, and make valuable information accessible to millions.
But they also alter the relationship between knowledge and authority.
A government or corporation that possesses detailed information about individuals acquires capabilities that can be used both to serve and to influence them.
The existence of those capabilities does not establish a legitimate right to exercise them.
This distinction is particularly important as institutions increasingly employ predictive systems.
A traditional administrative decision may depend on a documented action. An algorithmic system may instead classify someone according to correlations, inferred characteristics, or predicted risks.
The difference is consequential.
The system may be useful and statistically informative while remaining inaccurate or unfair when applied to particular individuals.
China provides a particularly disturbing example. In a 2019 investigation, Human Rights Watch examined the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), a surveillance system used by authorities in Xinjiang. It collected and analyzed extensive personal information, flagging individuals for investigation based on activities as ordinary as using certain messaging applications, changing phone numbers, or displaying religious practices.
The system operated within a broader campaign of surveillance and arbitrary detention targeting Uyghurs and other predominantly minorities. Some individuals flagged by the platform were subsequently detained. The case illustrates how automated profiling, concentrated state authority, and inadequate independent safeguards can transform everyday behavior into grounds for suspicion and potentially severe consequences.
It is an actual institutional failure, not a hypothetical technological dystopia.
Nor should every automated decision be treated as equivalent.
A legally enforceable government sanction differs from a private company’s decision to deny a service. Both differ from a recommendation algorithm that influences which information receives attention.
Their consequences, legal foundations, and available remedies are not identical.
Yet all three can become relevant to autonomy when they affect essential opportunities, operate without adequate transparency, and leave individuals with few alternatives.
The question is not whether algorithms should be prohibited. It is whether people retain meaningful protection against consequential decisions made through systems they cannot understand or effectively challenge.
There is also a more disturbing connection between modern technology and actual slavery.
In 2023, the United Nations human rights office documented trafficking into online scam operations in Southeast Asia. Victims were recruited or transported into compounds where they were compelled to conduct online fraud, sometimes under threats, confinement, violence, or other forms of coercion.
Subsequent United Nations reporting has examined how criminal organizations employ technologies, including artificial intelligence, to make such fraudulent operations more sophisticated.
These are cases involving actual trafficking and forced criminality, not the metaphorical institutional dependence described by the Baseline Trap.
Their inclusion serves a different purpose: technological progress does not automatically eliminate older forms of domination. It can also provide new instruments for exploitation.
The broader technological concern extends to private platforms.
Increasingly, employment, payments, communication, professional reputation, information, and access to customers may depend on interconnected digital services.
A worker can lose access to an important marketplace. A business may depend heavily on a single payment provider. An individual’s reputation or visibility may be shaped by systems whose criteria are difficult to examine.
These relationships are not inherently oppressive. Many platforms expand opportunities, lower barriers to entry, and make forms of independent work possible that previously did not exist.
The problem arises when alternatives become scarce and institutional decisions grow difficult to contest.
A person may discover that a financial application has been rejected, an account suspended, a professional opportunity withheld, or access to a service restricted. Some decisions will be justified; others may result from errors, discriminatory criteria, or institutional practices that are difficult to scrutinize.
The decisive issue is whether effective safeguards exist.
Can the individual understand the decision? Obtain a meaningful explanation? Appeal to an independent authority? Correct inaccurate information? Choose a competing provider without losing access to essential opportunities?
These questions become increasingly important as digital infrastructures grow more interconnected.
The future possibility of artificial superintelligence adds another dimension to the problem.
We do not know whether, when, or under what conditions systems capable of vastly surpassing human cognitive abilities across numerous domains will emerge. But if they do, the asymmetries between those who control these systems and those subject to their decisions could become even more pronounced.
The risk does not necessarily arise from artificial intelligence developing authoritarian intentions of its own. It may emerge from something more immediate: the concentration of data, computing infrastructure, and decision-making authority in the hands of a few human institutions, further amplified by increasingly powerful systems.
This possibility makes it even more important to preserve mechanisms of transparency, accountability, and effective contestation.
The danger is not that machines can make decisions. It is that decisions affecting human freedom may become increasingly difficult for humans to challenge.
Nearly two centuries before artificial intelligence, Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated a related tension.
In the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), he contemplated the possibility that democratic societies might develop forms of paternalistic power that differed from the openly violent despotisms of earlier periods.
Such authority could gradually surround citizens with detailed rules, administer their needs, and diminish the exercise of independent initiative without necessarily abolishing formal political institutions.
Tocqueville’s concern should not be interpreted as a claim that social protection inevitably produces authoritarianism. Institutions can protect individuals against private domination, insecurity, and violence.
His deeper insight was that political freedom depends on habits and opportunities for self-direction, not merely on the formal existence of elections or constitutional rights.
A society may preserve democratic procedures while allowing its citizens to become increasingly accustomed to having consequential decisions made on their behalf.
This is where the Baseline Trap reaches its most general form.
The issue is not whether protection, regulation, taxation, assistance, or technology should exist. It is whether the institutions providing these functions remain sufficiently limited, accountable, and contestable to preserve individual autonomy.
The same principles must apply to governmental and private power, even though their legal authority and forms of coercion differ.
A society cannot eliminate dependence. Nor should it attempt to do so. Cooperation and specialization are indispensable to modern civilization.
But necessary interdependence must not become an unquestioned justification for concentrated authority.
We should therefore judge institutions not only by the resources they distribute, the services they provide, or the problems they claim to solve, but also by the freedom they leave in the hands of those affected.
Do they expand meaningful opportunities? Do they preserve alternatives? Can their decisions be challenged? Are their powers proportionate to their legitimate purposes? Can individuals pursue different paths without facing unnecessarily punitive consequences?
These questions connect the two essays in this series.
In After the Rules: Can Radical Freedom Create Order?, the central problem was whether sophisticated social order requires extensive governmental direction.
Here, the corresponding question concerns the individual: can self-government survive when institutions progressively assume responsibility for decisions that people might otherwise make themselves?
The answer cannot be reduced to eliminating public institutions or expecting every individual to overcome disadvantage without assistance.
Neither can it be reduced to providing ever more services while treating the resulting dependence as evidence of success.
The meaningful test is whether protection strengthens the individual’s capacity to act independently or unnecessarily concentrates control over the conditions of that independence.
Pratchett’s poor man needed more than another pair of disposable boots. He needed the possibility of escaping a cycle in which every available choice reproduced the same disadvantage.
The principle applies to institutions that claim to expand freedom.
Their greatest achievement is not necessarily making themselves indispensable.
It may be enabling people to need them less.
The ultimate question is not who provides the boots, but whether the person wearing them retains the freedom to choose where to walk.
References
Amnesty International. (2021). Xenophobic Machines: Discrimination Through Unregulated Use of Algorithms in the Dutch Childcare Benefits Scandal.
Carone, G., Immervoll, H., Paturot, D., & Salomäki, A. (2004). Indicators of Unemployment and Low-Wage Traps: Marginal Effective Tax Rates on Employment Incomes. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 18.
Douglass, F. (1855). My Bondage and My Freedom. Miller, Orton & Mulligan.
Gilmore, J. R. (1864). Our Visit to Richmond. The Atlantic Monthly, September.
International Labour Organization, Walk Free, & International Organization for Migration. (2022). Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage. ILO.
Mississippi Secession Convention. (1861). A Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union. Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
OECD. (2021). Fiscal Federalism 2022: Making Decentralisation Work. OECD Publishing.
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2023). Online Scam Operations and Trafficking into Forced Criminality in Southeast Asia: Recommendations for a Human Rights Response.
Pratchett, T. (1993). Men at Arms. Victor Gollancz.
Tocqueville, A. de. (1840). Democracy in America. Volume II, Part IV, Chapter VI.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2025). Trafficking in Persons for the Purpose of Forced Criminality to Commit Online Scams. Report CTOC/COP/WG.4/2025/2.
World Justice Project. (2019). Global Insights on Access to Justice 2019.
Maurício Veloso Brant Pinheiro, PhD
Professor of Physics, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Founder, Author and Editor, AI-Talks.org
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