Terry -
mises.org
"...Fortunately for our society, support among economists for the free market is widespread. For almost any government activity, you can find an economist to argue that the market will provide the service in a better fashion. Yet who but Rothbard would think to ask, why should the government be allowed to collect information?
He makes a simple and devastating point: absent statistical data, the government could not interfere with the economy. "[S]tatistics are, in a crucial sense, critical to all interventionist and socialistic activities of government.... Statistics are the eyes and ears of the bureaucrat, the politician, the socialistic reformer. Only by statistics can they know, or at least have any idea about, what is going on in the economy.... Cut off those eyes and ears, destroy those crucial guidelines to knowledge, and the whole threat of government intervention is almost completely eliminated" (II, pp. 182-83)...."
Regards, Don |
