The Evils of Government Data Collection (And Its Origins)

I found it fascinating to learn from Zachary Karbell's new book, The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World, how intertwined government and statistics have been right from the start:

The word statistics wasn’t much used before the eighteenth century, and its origins are often ascribed to a German named Gottfried Achenwall, who combined Latin and Italian words to coin the term statistic to refer to data about the state.

Murray Rothbard always understood the evil in government data collection. From The Logic of Action II: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School:

Ours is truly an Age of Statistics. In a country and an era that worships statistical data as super "scientific," as offering us the keys to all knowledge, a vast supply of data of all shapes and sizes pours forth upon us. Mostly, it pours forth from government.

While private agencies and trade associations do gather and issue some statistics, they are limited to specific wants of specific industries. The vast bulk of statistics is gathered and disseminated by government. The overall statistics of the economy, the popular "gross national product" data that permits every economist to be a soothsayer of business conditions, come from government.

Furthermore, many statistics are by-products of other governmental activities: from the Internal Revenue bureau come tax data, from unemployment insurance departments come estimates of the unemployed, from customs offices come data on foreign trade, from the Federal Reserve flow statistics on banking, and so on. And as new statistical techniques are developed, new divisions of government departments are created to refine and use them.

The burgeoning of government statistics offers several obvious evils to the libertarian...

Not only do statistics gathering and producing go beyond the governmental function of defense of persons and property; not only are economic resources wasted and misallocated, and the taxpayers, industry, small business, and the consumer burdened. But, furthermore, statistics are, in a crucial sense, critical to all interventionist and socialist 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...

Thus, in all the host of measures that have been proposed over the years to check and limit government or to repeal its interventions, the simple and unspectacular abolition of government statistics would probably be the most thorough and most effective. Statistics, so vital to statism, its namesake, is also the State's Achilles' heel.

Then, of course, there is the perspective of the great apologist for the state, Paul Krugman :

Just a quick note in support of government statisticians. They do an incredibly important job, and by and large do it very well.