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?
Too many people think that capitalist societies work like socialist societies. They implicitly think that the government has full control over the knobs and levers of economic production and can build whatever it wants (just get rid of corruption) of implement any kind of policy.