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Public Reason: For Sam Francis the good society was always racist, patriarchal, hierarchical, gentry-ruled. People who had societal position by virtue of the property they had inherited (or acquired through their social networks, luck, and entrepreneurial drive) were under threat from Negroes, race-mixers, feminists and their male lapdogs, and educated élites whose education consisted in learning how to work the levers of corporate, NGO, government, media, and other bureaucracies. Francis’s desired end-state for coping with this particular one of the many crises of modernity was for a Caesarist leader who would assign the people missions and thus protect them from their enemies on the one hand, and strengthen plutocracy and networks of the wealthy and so solidify gentry predominance on the other. Enough entrepreneurship and enterprise allowing you to join the gentry to keep aggressive young whippersnappers from causing trouble as Robespierres and Lenins. Too little entrepreneurship and enterprise for creative destruction to unseat the gentry on the other. This is not Trumpism, but what Trumpism might be were Trump not incompetent. And this is definitely not the Burnham of The Machiavellians:

The Ghent Zeppelin: On Samuel Francis on Burnham, & what it means to read outside the intellectual Overton window: ‘It’s always odd to write admiring about someone [near-contemporary] whose work has both contemporary valence and seems to fall outside the Overton Window of serious scholarship….Francis treats Burnham’s Managerial Revolution as the diagnosis of a ‘civilizational crisis’… “The liquidation of the middle class and its bourgeois cultural order… by colossal corporate organizations… centralized, executive bureaucratic [governmental] regimes… [and] an eventual extirpation of bourgeois culture… as the product of… ‘capitalist’ oligarchy, and later… [of] a “white, male heterosexual, Christian” ruling class…”. Francis takes from Burnham (and Schumpeter) the idea that capitalism undermines bourgeois culture…. For Burnham qua Machiavellian the rise of Caesareanism and risk of despotism was wholly deplorable…. In Francis there is, however, a clear strain that welcomes Caesereanism as a way to fight and turn back the managerial revolution… <https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-samuel-francis-on-burnham-and>

Economics: Adam Posen pledges allegiance to team “r* has risen a lot”. However, the fact that—as of this week’s news about planned revisions to the payroll employment series—it looks as though nearly all of the increases in employment over the past year have come in health care and government gives me substantial pause with respect to Adam’s argument. The argument is basically this: at current interest rates employment and output growth continues, therefore interest rates are close to neutral given financial conditions and fiscal policy. Thus the Fed should not cut interest rates until it sees evidence of consequences that give it new reason to think that interest rates are above r. It seems to me that a year of next to no employment growth in the sectors of the economy susceptible to being influenced by monetary policy is already such a signal—modulus the state of fiscal policy, of course. And I find it hard to think fiscal policy is having much stimulative effect right now, in spite of being substantially out of balance. Yes, financial conditions are good—but financial conditions are fragile, lags are long and variable, and it seems to me highly imprudent to keep interest rates so high relative to what we know r was in the 2010s:

Adam Posen: Misreading the Impact of Monetary Policy: ‘Far from being too restrictive, US monetary policy is almost certainly too loose, judging by the robustness of financial markets and broader economic conditions even after 500 basis points of interest-rate hikes…. Financial markets are segmented, and central banks often must intervene directly in particular markets to have an impact…. As a forward indicator, financial conditions are at least as important as the slightly backward-looking signals sent by the labor market. Moreover, financial indicators remain quite accommodative. Equities have returned to high valuations <https://www.vanguard.co.uk/professional/insights-education/insights/us-equities-hit-new-highs-cause-for-caution>, and the decline <https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2024054pap.pdf> in longer-term Treasury rates has persisted. Interest-rate spreads (such as those between lower-rated corporate bonds and comparable duration Treasuries) have widened <https://www.reuters.com/markets/us-credit-spreads-widen-political-jitters-treasuries-rally-2024-06-21/> somewhat but remain very low by historical standards, let alone for the end of a Fed tightening cycle… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/federal-reserve-monetary-policy-remains-loose-and-ignoring-key-real-world-indicators-by-adam-posen-2-2024-08>

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