… is from page 118 of Robert Higgs’s Summer 1998 Independent Review essay, “Official Economic Statistics: The Emperor’s Clothes Are Dirty,” as this superb essay is reprinted in the 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan:
Far better for both justice and economic prosperity if the international trade statistics had never been collected. They have been and continue to be major means to the thoroughly mischievous ends of pandering politicians and their rent-seeking supporters.