Over the weekend, I had an opportunity to attend a dinner at which one of the speakers, a local boy made good, was a member of the Obama Administration.

He described the environment in which he worked perfectly. “Washington, D.C. is an interesting place,” he said, “that is completely surrounded by the real world.”

Truer words were never spoken.

If you spend any time at all paying attention to what goes on there, you inevitably find yourself wondering what would happen if government met reality in much the same was that Bambi once met Godzilla.

I was thinking about that as I sat in on the hearing before the Senate HELP Committee on worker misclassification last week.

Specifically, I thought it was really interesting how the lawmakers involved jumped through so many mental hoops about the subject and about how to put a stop to it.

There are two situations in which workers sometimes get misclassified. First, there are the unscrupulous firms that do it on purpose to save themselves money and cheat their employees.

The other situation is one in which the worker and the business have decided that is the relationship they want to have with each other but the government decides that their wishes are beside the point.

The fact is that, in most real-world situation, the worker decides whether they are an independent contractor, not the employer.

But, in Washington reality, it’s the other way around.

During the hearing, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) recalled an IRS employer tax seminar in which he was instructed that, if an employee wanted to be classified as an independent contractor, that was almost always wrong. The employer should ignore the employee’s wishes and make that judgment according to the IRS ten-point checklist.

Go figure.

In the end, independent contractors figured out that the way to circumvent having the government decide that they are not independent contractors when, in fact, they are, was to file the necessary paperwork to turn themselves into companies.

The lawmakers, sadly, are still trying to figure things out.