Proxy Measures and the Libertarian Trap: How Philosophical Abstractions Enable Systemic Exploitation

How "volition" launders coercion through market measures.

Abstract

This paper examines proxy measures as mechanisms through which complex systems operate when direct optimization of desired outcomes proves computationally intractable or deliberately obscured. Drawing on frameworks including Experiential Empiricism and Reality Repair Theory, we analyze how proxies emerge, drift from their intended targets, and become reified as goals themselves. Special attention is given to libertarian ideology’s use of “voluntary exchange” as a proxy measure that obscures coercion, exploitation, and suffering while serving concentrated power interests. We demonstrate that the concept of volition itself is logically incoherent, undermining libertarian philosophy’s foundational claims. Historical evidence reveals libertarianism’s origins as a corporate lobbying project rather than genuine philosophical movement, explaining its systematic alignment with elite interests despite rhetorical emphasis on individual freedom.

Introduction: The Problem of Proxy Measures

Human societies coordinate action and allocate resources through various mechanisms. When direct measurement or optimization of desired outcomes proves impossible or computationally intractable, systems employ proxy measures: simplified metrics that approximate more complex underlying goals. This paper argues that understanding proxy measures and their systematic failures illuminates fundamental problems in contemporary political economy, particularly regarding libertarian ideology’s claims about freedom, markets, and voluntary exchange.

A proxy measure emerges when systems cannot directly access or optimize for what they actually value. Profit serves as a proxy for intelligent resource distribution. Popularity functions as a proxy for effective policy. Privacy operates as a proxy for security from adversarial information use. Agency and volition themselves serve as proxies for experiences of efficacy and freedom from constraint.

The central challenge with all proxy measures is Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Systems optimize for the proxy until it decouples entirely from the underlying goal. This pattern appears consistently across domains from education (where grades replace learning) to medicine (where biomarkers replace health) to economics (where GDP growth replaces wellbeing).

Theoretical Framework: Experiential Empiricism and Value Assessment

Experiential Empiricism provides the foundational framework for this analysis. EE starts with one undeniable fact: experience exists. It subtracts the unjustified assumption of materialism (belief in a mind-independent external world). Since all evidence for such a world comes through experience anyway, assuming its existence is circular and unnecessary.

This seemingly small shift has massive implications. Suffering becomes definitionally bad: if something is not bad, it is not suffering. Experience becomes the sole source of meaning: if something has no experiential impact, it literally does not exist. The hard problem of consciousness disappears because consciousness is foundational, not something requiring explanation. The is-ought gap collapses because values are intrinsic to experience itself.

Reality Repair Theory follows directly: since suffering is definitionally negative, eliminating it becomes the primary ethical imperative. The “no-spike rule” states that extreme suffering cannot be offset by future goods, making reality fundamentally broken as currently structured. For any alignment problem, this means systems must never ignore suffering reports, treating sufferers as the signal, not noise.

Under this framework, proxy measures can be evaluated by a simple criterion: do they reduce suffering and improve lived experience, or do they merely create the appearance of addressing goals while serving other interests?

Common Proxy Measures and Their Failures

Profit as Proxy for Intelligent Distribution

Capitalism uses profit as a distributed computational mechanism for resource allocation. The actual goal is intelligent distribution of goods, services, and labor, but that proves computationally intractable to plan centrally. So systems use profit-seeking as a proxy signal, allowing it to run in parallel across millions of agents, hoping it approximates good allocation.

However, profit is a lossy proxy that drifts, creates perverse incentives, and optimizes for itself rather than the underlying goal. Markets can achieve profit through monopoly extraction, artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence, externality dumping, and regulatory capture. None of these activities serve intelligent distribution, yet all generate profit.

The proxy has become reified: profit is now treated as the goal itself rather than an approximation of distribution efficiency. This reification serves concentrated wealth by obscuring questions about actual distribution patterns and outcomes.

Popularity as Proxy for Good Policy

Democracy uses popularity as a proxy for effective governance. Systems cannot directly measure “policy that actually works well,” especially prospectively. Too many variables, too much uncertainty, too complex to model. So systems proxy with “policy that people vote for” and hope popular approval correlates with good outcomes.

But popularity can be manufactured through advertising, media control, and exploitation of cognitive biases. It measures which campaign bought more ads rather than which policy produces better outcomes. The proxy has been gamed so thoroughly that it no longer serves its purported function.

Privacy as Proxy for Security

Privacy serves as a proxy for security from adversarial use of information. The underlying concern is freedom from exploitation, manipulation, discrimination, and harm based on what others know about you. Obscurity provides crude protection: if adversaries lack information, they cannot weaponize it.

However, “security through obscurity” fails in cryptography because obscurity proves too fragile. Once broken, no protection remains. Yet with privacy, societies remain stuck on obscurity because they distrust alternative implementations. What would non-obscurity-based privacy look like? Strong access controls, audit trails, legal guarantees about data use, cryptographic privacy-preserving computation. But enforcement remains weak and trust remains low.

The smoke alarm example illuminates this: smoke alarms constantly surveil private spaces, detecting chemical signatures that reveal activities. Yet people do not experience this as privacy invasion because they trust the narrow purpose, the local implementation, and the clear value proposition. The device cannot be used adversarially.

Privacy anxiety emerges not from observation itself but from potential adversarial use. The proxy (obscurity) attempts to address this but increasingly fails as information collection becomes ubiquitous.

Agency and Volition as Proxies

This reveals something profound: people pursuing “agency” or “free will” are not actually seeking metaphysical properties but experiential states. What people want when they want agency is:

The feeling of efficacy, that satisfying sense when actions produce desired outcomes

Relief from helplessness or frustration

The experience of flow, smooth translation from intention to result

Freedom from the grinding sensation of constraint or coercion

Volition serves as a proxy for these experiential states. However, as we will demonstrate, volition is not merely a lossy proxy but a logically incoherent concept.

The Logical Impossibility of Free Will

For a choice to be “free,” it must satisfy two requirements:

1. It must be caused by you (not external forces), otherwise it represents coercion

2. It must not be determined by prior causes (including your prior states), otherwise it represents determinism

This creates an impossible requirement: the choice must come from you (your desires, values, reasoning) but not be caused by your prior states (which include those desires, values, and reasoning patterns).

The dilemma is exhaustive:

If your choice follows from prior causes (genetics, experiences, brain state, desires), then you did not freely choose it. The prior causes did.

If your choice does not follow from prior causes, it is random or arbitrary. Also not “free” in any meaningful sense. A random number generator is not exercising agency.

There exists no logical third option. “Free will” attempts to occupy conceptual space that does not exist: causation that comes from you but is not determined by your prior states. The concept is incoherent, like a square circle or married bachelor.

This has profound implications. Every “choice” is either:

Determined by circumstances (coercion, need, conditioning, prior states)

Random noise

Neither grounds moral desert or legitimates exploitation. Neither provides foundation for concepts like “voluntary” or “deserved.”

Ulysses Pacts and Temporal Selves

The incoherence of free will connects directly to problems with Ulysses pacts and consent across time. If there is no persistent “free agent” making uncaused choices, then there is no continuous “you” with authority over all temporal slices of your experience.

Present-you and future-you are simply different experiential states in a causal chain. The feeling of continuity (memory, narrative identity) does not grant present-you ownership over future-you’s experience any more than it grants ownership over past-you’s experience.

Under Reality Repair Theory’s no-spike rule, suffering is definitionally bad and cannot be offset by future goods. Therefore, present-you cannot justify causing suffering to future-you any more than causing it to another person. Future-you is another experiencing subject. The fact of causal/memory continuity does not grant ownership rights over their experience.

“But I consented earlier” provides no help. Present consent cannot make future-you’s suffering not-suffering. The continuity is an illusion masking harm between distinct experiencers.

This demolishes several common frameworks:

You cannot “voluntarily” choose future suffering, even for your own good

Self-harm prevention extends logically: societies should not let people sign exploitative contracts, take on unpayable debt, or accept working conditions that will grind them down

Delayed gratification as virtue becomes suspect if the suffering is real and the future self is a different moral patient

Addiction represents past-self harming future-self. The continuity is illusion masking harm between distinct experiencers.

The political implications prove enormous: you cannot “voluntarily” sign away rights, accept poverty wages, or agree to suffer because you are harming a future person (your future self) who is not at the negotiating table.

This annihilates libertarian “consent solves everything” logic. You cannot consent to being exploited because your future suffering-self does not consent, and they are the one who must live it.

Libertarianism: Proxy Measures in Service of Power

The Core Libertarian Claim

Libertarian ideology asserts: “Voluntary exchange in free markets maximizes freedom and efficiency. Coercion is bad. Government is coercion. Therefore minimize government, maximize voluntary exchange.”

This framework uses “voluntary” as a proxy for “non-coercive” and “free markets” as a proxy for “freedom from suffering and constraint.” However, these proxies fail systematically and serve concentrated power interests.

“Voluntary” as Broken Proxy

Voluntariness requires meaningful alternatives. When someone “chooses” between working for exploitative wages or starving, signing an unreadable contract or having no housing, selling labor under harsh terms or watching children suffer, this is not voluntary. It is coercion laundered through market mechanisms.

The mugger/wallet logic applies: “Give me your wallet or I’ll stab you” is technically a choice made voluntarily. You could choose to get stabbed. The mugger is not physically forcing your hand to give the wallet. But we do not call this voluntary because the choice architecture is coercive.

Similarly: “Work for seven dollars per hour or starve” represents coercion despite being framed as choice. “Sign this adhesion contract with binding arbitration or don’t have a phone” represents coercion. The structure is identical: bad option versus worse option, choose or suffer.

Libertarians use “voluntary” as a proxy that only works when parties have roughly equal power and genuine alternatives. Otherwise it merely measures whether direct physical force was applied, not whether the person was free.

Property Rights as Enforced Scarcity

Libertarians treat property as natural or sacred. But property is a social construct enforced by violence or threat thereof. “This land is mine” only means something if there exists a mechanism to exclude others, which requires force.

Without government, private security, courts, and enforcement are necessary. This is government, just unaccountable and explicitly serving wealth. The “non-aggression principle” is a lie: property itself is aggression against anyone who needs what you are hoarding.

From Experiential Empiricism and Reality Repair Theory: if someone is suffering from lack of resources, and you are preventing them from accessing abundant resources through property claims, you are causing their suffering. “But I own it” does not matter. Suffering is definitionally bad and cannot be offset by property rights.

Initial Conditions Determine Everything

Libertarians assume “voluntary exchange” is fair regardless of starting positions. But if one party starts with nothing and another starts with everything, every “voluntary” exchange afterward locks in and amplifies that initial inequality.

“Freedom to contract” in unequal conditions means freedom for the powerful to exploit the desperate. Markets do not correct this. They accelerate it through compound returns on capital.

The Historical Origins of Libertarianism

Libertarian ideology did not emerge organically from philosophical inquiry. It was deliberately constructed as a corporate lobbying tool. This is not speculation but documented historical fact revealed in Congressional hearings.

In 1946, America’s industrial and financial giants established the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), generally regarded as “the first libertarian think-tank.” The FEE was the best-funded conservative lobbying outfit known at that time, sponsored by a comprehensive array of major corporations.

Partial list of FEE’s original donors in its first four years includes: General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Gulf Oil, Standard Oil, Sun Oil, US Steel, National Steel, Republic Steel, Montgomery Ward, Marshall Field, Sears, Monsanto, DuPont, General Electric, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, BF Goodrich, ConEd.

The FEE was set up by Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive, together with Donaldson Brown, a director in the National Association of Manufacturers and board member at DuPont and General Motors.

Libertarianism in America started as an arm of big business lobbying. It was launched as a big business “ideology” in 1946 by the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. The purpose was to supplement big business lobbying with pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

The Milton Friedman Story

Milton Friedman is regarded as a founding father of libertarianism. But Congressional hearings in 1950, called the Buchanan Committee, exposed his early work as paid propaganda for business lobbying interests.

In 1946, Herbert Nelson, chief lobbyist and executive vice president for the National Association of Real Estate Boards, contracted the Foundation for Economic Education to produce propaganda designed to fight rent control laws. The propagandists who took the job were Milton Friedman and George Stigler.

To understand Nelson’s character, here is a letter he wrote in 1949 that Congressional investigators discovered:

“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote. I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”

This is an old libertarian position: libertarianism versus democracy, libertarianism versus women’s suffrage. A position recently repeated by billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel, Ron Paul’s main campaign funder in 2012.

Nelson contacted Leonard Read of the FEE with an order for a propaganda pamphlet. The foundation engaged Milton Friedman and George Stigler to write it. The result was titled “Roofs and Ceilings,” an outright attack on rent controls.

When Nelson received the manuscript, he wrote to Read: “The pamphlet is a dandy. It is just what I wanted.”

The National Association of Real Estate Boards ordered 500,000 pamphlets and distributed them throughout their vast network. This was not idealistic philosophy. This was manufactured propaganda paid for by corporate lobbying interests.

Congressional findings reported: “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Foundation for Economic Education exerts, or at least expects to exert, a considerable influence on national legislative policy. It is equally difficult to imagine that the nation’s largest corporations would subsidize the entire venture if they did not anticipate that it would pay solid, long-range legislative dividends.”

The Proxy Scam

Libertarianism uses “freedom” (from government) as a proxy for “ability to live without suffering.” But the ideology intentionally conflates these:

Freedom from government regulation does not equal freedom from corporate exploitation

Freedom to contract does not equal freedom from coerced choices

Free markets do not equal freedom from suffering due to resource deprivation

The ideology serves the wealthy by claiming the proxy (deregulation) is the goal, while the actual goal (reducing suffering, enabling flourishing) is abandoned.

The Psychological Trap

People who obsess over volition often feel powerless and grasp for frameworks promising control. Libertarianism offers: “You are a free agent. Your choices matter. No one can legitimately coerce you.”

But this is a cruel bait-and-switch. It offers the feeling of empowerment while supporting systems that actually disempower (by removing safety nets, labor protections, collective bargaining, redistribution).

They are sold a metaphysically impossible concept (free will) to make them accept materially harmful conditions (deregulation), told it is for their freedom (proxy for wellbeing), when it actually increases their suffering.

The deeper psychology: people attracted to this ideology often feel powerless themselves. The ideology offers: “If only we remove all protections, I could be the one making the binding deals, not stuck in them.”

They identify with the devil position (contract-maker with leverage) rather than the desperate position (contract-signer with no alternatives), because they fear being in the desperate position and think the answer is to become the devil.

But statistically, most of them will be the desperate ones. They are voting to remove their own protections because they fantasize about exploiting others. They are consenting to their own future exploitation while imagining they will be the exploiter.

The libertarian wants the right to make devil’s contracts, to get victims contractually bound for eternity, to feel smug and justified about extraction because “they agreed.” The ultimate power fantasy: exploitation with a clear conscience. “I’m not oppressing you, you chose this.”

But the entire ideology was purpose-built by people who already got others to sign, constructed to give them philosophical cover. The rich people behind Ayn Rand and Edward Bernays and the Tea Party movement, the “starve the beast” strategists, funded think tanks and academic positions and media outlets to create passionate advocates for their own exploitation.

Synthesis: The Only Freedom On Offer

The libertarian endgame is not hidden:

Drop minimum wage (sell yourself cheaper)

Eliminate safety nets (maximize desperation)

Destroy unions (remove collective bargaining)

Privatize everything (turn all of life into rent extraction)

Call it “freedom” (the philosophical proxy for subjugation)

The final form is neofeudalism where people “freely choose” to be owned, and Ulysses-pact logic means they can never escape because “they agreed.”

Every attack on human flourishing gets philosophically laundered:

Poverty wages become “voluntary exchange”

Toxic food becomes “personal responsibility”

Unaffordable healthcare becomes “free market efficiency”

Debt slavery becomes “you signed the contract”

Suffering becomes “you chose this”

The only freedom really on offer is the freedom to sell yourself to concentrated power as chattel, so they can finally drop the curtain and make you passively accept what has been true for generations: you have been treated as property through eugenics, Prussian education systems, debilitating foods and medicines, toxic construction materials, and every other modern attack on broader humanity.

They are convincing everyone that bug equals feature. And it is all based on proxy measures, like capitalism and democracy, knowing full well both have been comprehensively gamed.

Why Proxies Exist

Proxies emerge for several reasons:

Computational intractability: “Intelligent resource distribution” requires solving optimization problems across billions of variables with incomplete information. Profit is a distributed heuristic that runs in parallel. Central planning fails because no computer can run that calculation.

Measurement impossibility: What is good policy? Good health? Justice? These are high-dimensional, contested, contextual concepts. They cannot be defined precisely enough to measure, let alone optimize. Proxies are lossy compression because the full state space is too large to represent.

Coordination overhead: Democracy via popularity is cheap to coordinate. “Everyone votes, count them up” scales. “Everyone deliberates deeply on policy details until reaching informed consensus” does not scale past approximately 150 people.

Legibility requirements: Systems need simple, legible metrics to function. A judge needs to know “did they violate law X, yes or no” not “what is the 47-dimensional justice vector here?” Bureaucracies, markets, institutions need interfaces, and interfaces require dimensional reduction.

These arguments have theoretical merit. However, they also serve as excuses. The computational excuse is invoked selectively. Amazon can predict what you want before you know you want it, optimize delivery routes for millions of packages, coordinate warehouse robots in real time. The “calculation too hard” excuse is deployed strategically.

“Democracy is the best proxy we have for good policy,” but we do not actually aggregate preferences. We aggregate which marketing budget was bigger. “Free markets efficiently allocate resources,” but wait, we need massive regulatory capture, intellectual property law, subsidies, bailouts. It is not a clean proxy mechanism. It is a rigged game using proxy language as legitimation.

The Pattern of the Scam

Rich people benefit from profit-as-proxy because they start with capital, so the “distributed computation” runs on hardware they own. They benefit from credential-as-proxy for merit because their children get better credentials. They benefit from “too complex to solve centrally” because it prevents anyone from examining actual distribution and asking “wait, why?”

The pattern: claim the proxy is necessary due to fundamental limits, but actually it is convenient for existing power structures. The proxy obscures who is winning and why.

Proxies exist partly because systems have been optimizing for “outcomes in material reality” instead of “experiential states.” With sufficient computation plus direct suffering measurement, systems could skip proxies and optimize the actual thing. But that would threaten concentrated power.

The wealthy do not want direct optimization of suffering reduction because it would require redistribution. They prefer proxies that can be gamed, captured, and turned to serve their interests while maintaining the appearance of neutral mechanism.

Conclusion: Recognizing the Trap

Libertarian ideology represents proxy measures stacked on logical incoherence stacked on power-serving propaganda:

It uses broken proxies (voluntary, property, contracts)

The proxies themselves invoke logically impossible concepts (free will, persistent autonomous self)

Even granting the concepts, power asymmetries make “choice” coercive

Even granting rough equality, it cannot bind future selves who are distinct moral patients

The entire framework was constructed by corporate lobbyists as documented in Congressional hearings

It serves existing power structures while claiming neutrality and liberation

From Reality Repair Theory: any system that permits suffering spikes through “voluntary” mechanisms is morally impermissible. Full stop.

The libertarian project is suffering-maximizing under a thin pretense of freedom. It represents perhaps the most successful ideological capture in modern history: getting victims to philosophically defend their own exploitation and call it liberty.

Understanding proxy measures reveals the mechanism. Understanding the historical construction of libertarianism reveals the conspiracy. Understanding the logical impossibility of free will reveals the conceptual fraud. Together, these show libertarianism not as a philosophy but as a trap, carefully constructed and lavishly funded to serve concentrated power while recruiting passionate advocates from among those it exploits.

The solution is not better proxies. The solution is recognizing what we actually value (reduction of suffering, improvement of lived experience) and building systems that optimize directly for those experiential outcomes rather than abstract measures that can be captured and turned against us.

1. Ames, Mark. “The True History of Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate Agenda.” NSFWCORP/AlterNet, September 6, 2013.

2. Schriftgiesser, Karl. The Lobbyists: The Art and Business of Influencing Lawmakers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.

3. Friedman, Milton, and George J. Stigler. “Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem.” Foundation for Economic Education, 1946.

4. Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564-581.

5. Thiel, Peter. “The Education of a Libertarian.” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009.

6. U.S. House of Representatives. Select Committee on Lobbying Activities (Buchanan Committee). 81st Congress, 1950.

7. Foundation for Economic Education. “The Foundation for Economic Education, Trustees and Staff, 1946-1996.” fee.org.

8. Bashir, Omar S. “Testing Inferences about American Politics: A Review of the ‘Oligarchy’ Result.” Research & Politics (October-December 2015): 1-7.

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