Conversation with John Mackey of Whole Foods on Libertarian Theory (Mark Skousen and Richard Ebeling too) Dear John: It all depends. For the mainstream empiricist monetarist like Friedman, it would be falsifiable; you’d just go out and measure whether or not inflationary expectations are low, whether or not the demand to hold money has increased (parenthetically, these two are not unrelated). If this was true, then the monetarist hypothesis would be accepted in this one case. If not, rejected. It is not at all falsifiable for Austrian economists such as myself (and Mises, Rothbard and others). We do not agree with your implicit contention that if a claim is not falsifiable, that it is just a mere tautology, having nothing to do with the real world.