“According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service, more than 35 million U.S. taxpayers are self-employed.”

See that? That is a quote from the Advocacy research covered in this week’s news and it illustrates an oft-repeated point.

It really is true that the type and quality of the statistics you get depends on your source.

If you were to go to the Labor Department looking for the number of U.S. citizens who are self- employed, the number you’d get would be somewhere in the vicinity of 12 or 13 million.

What’s more, that figure has fluctuated quite a bit over the last decade or so but it has remained more or less in the vicinity of between 11 and 13 million — in spite of the veritable explosion in the number of nonemployer businesses in the meantime.

There are reasons for the differences in the numbers, which I won’t go into right now. Suffice it to say that both numbers are legitimate, within certain parameters and for certain purposes.

The Labor Department is hostile to self-employment, largely because it concerns itself with workers who are employees. Employees have certain rights that are protected by the Labor Department. Independent contractors and those self-employed types take work away from employees, when employees ought to have first dibs on it.

Well, after all, it is the Labor Department.

Treasury, and in particular, the IRS, has no such biases. All they care about is that everybody pay their taxes.

In fact, I have come across taxpayer advice on the IRS web site instructing people who accept bribes, commit fraud, and rob people of their property not to forget to pay their taxes. Who knew the IRS was such a tolerant bunch?

Thirty-five million self-employed makes a lot more sense in light of that 21.7 million nonemployer businesses, which doesn’t even account for quite all the self-employed.

All this may seem a bit silly to you but I caution you to pay attention. Right now, this country is in the hands of a lot of people who are very friendly to labor and, while they haven’t said so, they are inclined to be less-than-friendly to the self-employed.

I’m sure they wouldn’t put it that way but, trust me, that’s the way it is. And I’m not the only one who has noticed.