Keynote by Prof. Dr. Bernhard Neumärker at the FRIBIS Annual Conference 2024: “Real Freedom & New Ordoliberalism: The Case for a (Full) Basic Income”

Abstract: A certain concept of Liberty / Freedom developed by Cooter (1987) is introduced and applied to the political regimes of Autocracy and Neo Liberalism. The adjusted concept shows an essential mix of unorthodox goods characteristics including formal liberty as being priceless or worthless, and different to real freedom. Van Parijs approach of real freedom (see, e.g., Vanderborght/Van Parijs 2017) is adopted respectively reconstructed as a political restriction giving Liberty as a good a certain value rather than a social goal which has to be maximized.

Real freedom always requires a full basic income as the neo-liberal logic of Friedman’s Negative Income Tax concept (Friedman 1962) which might be politically implementable from a libertarian point of view shows that partial basic income may lead the society into a libertarian trap. On the other side basic liberty may be priceless when an autocratic regime tries to compensate any loss in liberty by wealth/income increases. This is, then, the authoritarian trap. The keynote discusses how much a (full) basic income can prevent citizens from moving into one of these these traps and, thereby, preventing authoritarian as well as neo-liberal/libertarian regimes.

Biography: Prof. Dr. Bernhard Neumärker is the Head of FRIBIS (Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies) and holds the Götz Werner Professorship for Economic Policy and Constitutional Economic Theory at the University of Freiburg. For many years, Prof. Neumärker has been examining issues of social justice, societal conflicts, and governmental reform readiness from an ordoliberal perspective. Recently, he has been applying his concepts of “New Ordoliberalism” (also known as “Progressive Ordoliberalism”) and “Social Sustainability” to the idea of unconditional basic income. His work bridges economic policy theory with practical approaches to social and economic reform.