“To be innovative...you need to be free.”

At a two-day online conference hosted by Calcalist, the Jerusalem office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom spoke about how civil liberties can be protected in a world where startups operate in a separate space from governments that defend privacy rights, freedoms, and dignities. Julius von Freytag-Loringhoven, Head of its Jerusalem office, joined James Spiro to share some valuable insights.

“At the core, liberal values are about individual dignity freedom, and what makes an innovative environment,” he said in his opening remarks. “There are lots of academic theories about it, but at the end it’s (first) about reducing bureaucracy, reducing coerciveness, and so liberating people to think freely.”

According to von Freytag-Loringhoven, then there needs to be an element of freedom at the core of liberalism felt at a societal level, not just the personal. “When you see liberalism and the State playing a role to enable people to provide education and infrastructure - at the end, you need both. To be innovative, you need some background and knowledge, and then you need to be free.”

In recent years, there has been a myriad of public debates about what part governments should play in helping - or hindering - the innovation that is accelerated by tech companies around the world. The startup mentality of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ can have long-reaching effects, with many unsure what will happen to the democratic process.

“The question is how to enable an environment where innovation can thrive is, in the end, at the core of liberal policy debates. This is exactly where we're going. The big thing that startups do, and innovative entrepreneurial enterprises do, is that they bring something new to our table - be it in our economy, our politics, our social environment… And so we don’t know yet to what this leads us. The core question which we ask ourselves all the time is 'where is this all going?’”

You can watch the entire exchange in the video above.