Where are “people” (Conservatives) getting this idea from? Governments do not have total information of the production of all goods produced in the world. How hard is it to understand they just look at the shipping location of items and their classified category?
What’s funny is that the only time this was attempted was by the USSR and Chile in the 70s when they were trying to computerize this information for purposes of economic decision making. Nobody else has done any publically available cybernetics work.