Your questions are excellent. Indeed there is a reason Mises spent the first 100 pages of Human Action on epistemology.

There is actually no conflict at all between Misesian and Popperian epistemologies. The Popperian is simply a special case of the Misesian. Mises will, if you give him a chance, make a good case that there is such a thing as logic, and that we cannot refuse to believe in its results. Popper presents a logical explanation of why one very elegantly defined inductive method is such a predictable producer of truth. But if you don’t believe in logic, you have no reason to believe in Popper.

Both Mises and Popper would, I believe, agree that in the words “wealth” and “measuring instrument” you have constructed concepts that cannot be defined or questioned. I cannot think of any criticism which applies to the labor theory of value from which your concept of wealth strikes me as exempt, and perhaps the two are simply identical.

As Albert Jay Nock put it (in Memoirs of a Superfluous Man):

In those days I noticed with amusement that some philoso-
phers of “the social consciousness” had carried their speculations
up into the higher realm of scholastic metaphysics. I could make
nothing of Sir Leslie Stephen’s notion of a “social organism” but
that society exists as an objective entity apart from the indi-
viduals who make it up. I had long known that the Church lays
claim to that sort of unsubstantial existence, but I was never
metaphysician enough to get a very clear idea of how this could
be so. I should say that if a Church or “the Church” no longer
had any members it would no longer have any existence; and
I should say the same of society. Albertus Magnus and his great
pupil Thomas would sniff at Sir Leslie Stephen’s “social organ-
ism” and the curious product, apparently ectoplasmic, which
he calls a “social tissue,” and they would at once catch the fine
old familiar fusty aroma of universals existing objectively.

Austrian economics can be empirically demonstrated to be incorrect. You look at societies based on markets and societies not based on markets, the former work better.

If you don’t use empirical facts as the basis for truth, then how do you know if you are right?

The RMB or ren min bi is the generic name for China’s currency - apparently it means “people’s currency” - whereas the yuan is the largest unit of that currency. Like sterling and pounds.

The proposition expressed in your first sentence is certainly common. However, I have never seen anyone attempt to justify it from first principles. It corresponds to a kind of magical thinking which is cognitively very accessible, and it is politically convenient for a wide variety of actors. These factors strike me as sufficient to explain its popularity.

Money does not “represent” an economy. It is simply a good that is exchanged for others. If your money has no intrinsic value, the monetary authority can dilute it with perfect symmetry by simply redenominating it. Asymmetrical dilution is therefore equivalent to redistribution of savings.

Redistribution can certainly have macroeconomic effects. And it is by no means harmful by definition. If you confiscated all but the last million from the world’s 1000 richest people and distributed it evenly among the citizens of, say, Mali, the result could certainly be described as a boom, and it would be hard to argue that you had made the world worse. However, what this has to do with “growth” is by no means clear.

As for “real” wealth, again, there is no way to define it other than a price system. And prices are momentary, not persistent. Last year’s prices for last year’s goods cannot be systematically related to this year’s prices for this year’s goods.

If I can pack Keynesians and monetarists into one large, wriggling bag for a moment, and refer to them both as “modelers,” the way modelers think about macroeconomics is very similar to the way that pre-20C doctors thought about medicine. They had a wide number of procedures whose outcomes they could observe. However, they had no way to conduct controlled experiments on their patients, and their ideas of cause and effect were (with the benefit of hindsight) entirely fallacious. In retrospect, some of their procedures worked and others were completely pointless.

Austrian economics is never going to be competitive on the witch-doctor market. It is not particularly useful for civil servants. As a civil servant, you want to have numbers and formulas to back up your PowerPoints. You want to convey the impression that any attempt on the part of reckless politicians to quarrel with the policies that your models dictate will only sink them deeper into a sea of science from which there is no escape. Both Keynesian and monetarist macroeconomics are perfectly designed for this role.

But Austrian logic cannot be demonstrated or disproved by any empirical result. The Austrian edifice is large and I have no doubt that it contains its share of fallacies. But if you want to find them, you have to dust off your brain and crawl into the ducts.

There are a lot of different explanations for 1929, but here I subscribe to the ideas of the monetarists rather than the Austrians. The reason for this is that there have been a number of incidents that *could* have turned into a depression, but didn’t (1973, 1993, 1998, 1987, 2001). In these cases, the powers that be followed a policy prescriptions that was the direct opposite what what von Mises would do, and in those cases, it seems to have worked. The one case in which there was a depression (Japan-1990’s), the central bank followed a policy which monetarists would argue would cause disaster and it did.

None of the variables you mention - money supply, GDP growth, or velocity - is meaningful. Except for velocity, they all rely on aggregates which are founded on subjective impressions, ie, fudge factors. Velocity at least can be precisely defined, but it is difficult to measure, and its only conceivable relevance is in the context of MV = PQ, in which P and Q are meaningless aggregates. M is well-defined in a hard-money economy, but not under central banking. GDP growth depends on the GDP deflator, which is pure fudge.

The example I like to use is comparing a 2007 Mustang to a 1967 Mustang. I assert that any number you can produce that purports to define how much better (or worse) the 2007 Mustang is than the 1967 Mustang is a fudge factor. In fact I can think of no better definition of “fudge factor.” But you can head over to the BLS and have them tell you all about index chaining, and who knows - they may even have this particular number. I mean, it’s compiled by a nonpartisan federal agency, so it must be true.

My point was just that a lot of new yuan are being created in China. (I’m sure there is an explanation of the difference between yuan and renminbi somewhere on the Internet, but Google has not been helpful in connecting me with it. If anyone can explain this point I would be curious.) Many of these new yuan are no doubt ending up on the balance sheets of Chinese enterprises, making them look more profitable than they otherwise would. If China were to stop creating new yuan, many of these enterprises might seem less valuable.

This is an old Mises point which strikes me as relatively uncontroversial. I mean, it’s not like I’m getting all Louis McFadden on the PBOC. (Which is presumably not backing any of its notes with Scotch receivables or human hair - although it is interesting to note the parallels between US:UK:1929 and China:US:2007.)

What appears to be the case is that as time passes, the money velocity is increasing.

big risky deval prone reserve build up

but its the bestr way for unbalanced export heavy trade pathing

far faster export trade growth

plus slower import trade growth:

domestic protection and export incentive both

and
without “intentional”
bias toward one sector over another
and not obviously anti fair trade the way tariffs and quotas would be

and not aimed at any one nation either

what’s not to like ???

especially
if your behind the tech fronteer
then its the only sure route to world class technique to boot

too good to give up without a serious outside push

only the victims united
can stop the scam

ie

in this case

the us job class and soon the euro job class too
forcing their gubmints to act