Small business policy that is good for microbusinesses is hard.

During a Microbusiness Conversation last month, when the issue of sound public policy to help microbusinesses came up, here is how they described the essential policy challenge:

“What do you need? And can somebody afford to give that sort of help and can somebody pay for it?”

Those insightful words fell from the lips of Dr. Zolten Acs, chief economist for the SBA Office of Advocacy, and he’s right. This is the essential policy challenge for microbusinesses.

It’s harder to answer these questions than you might think.

The fact is that microbusiness owners who fail to worship at the Altar of Growth always seem to be subject to these kinds of value judgments by … well, by pretty much everybody.

My point here is that these are value judgments, no matter what anybody else says, and they are predicated on a certain set of assumptions.

They assume that all growth is good.

They assume that there is no such thing as “enough.”

They assume that anybody who doesn’t want to have a business in order to grow a business should not own a business. They should go find a job instead.

Last week might have been described as euphoric for me, because both the firm size class numbers for 2007 and the nonemployer numbers for 2008 were released. When does that ever happen?

And it is usually around this time that at least one person wonders what the big deal is. After all, they’re just numbers, right?

And that’s true. These releases are not contained on other people’s research reports, like most of the research I cover. They are raw data, nothing but numbers.

But these numbers, over time, show trends. Those trends matter, to both the microbusinesses they describe and the overall economy they inhabit.

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 [...]

Those forms on Everything-You-Could-Possibly-Imagine.gov all say that somebody reads each and every submission but we have no way of knowing, really.

And even if they do, the odds of those emails being read by somebody who matters, somebody who is in a position to evaluate a new idea on the merits and maybe take it to the President and say, “Excuse me, sir, but here’s something that I don’t believe we’ve considered … ”

… those odds are very slim. Let’s face it: all the evidence suggests that they don’t really want to know what we think. We all know that, even though they would be much happier if we pretended we didn’t.

It shouldn’t really be all that much of a surprise that access to capital is the only tune President Obama seems to know when it comes to small businesses.

There are more than 27 million small businesses in the country and most of them don’t rely on debt financing beyond their credit cards for much of anything. Most of them bootstrap their way to success.

It’s an interesting lesson in the way that small business policy often has very little to do with real small businesses, don’t you think?

As I listened, I realized that there was one thing that I was hearing and one other thing that I was not hearing.

What I heard was this: ladies and gentlemen, what we are describing is the future of doing business. Technology will change the way we operate, as we become able to accomplish more with our lean, über-efficient operations. We invite you to gaze upon the future of small business.

What I did not hear was this: oh, by the way, operating in this lean and efficient way will mean we will probably find it unnecessary to hire as many people to staff our firms as we used to.

Meanwhile, everywhere else you look — whether it is at social safety nets or whether it is at a National Broadband Plan or whether it is at the push to increase U.S. exports — there appears to be no place in Obamaland for the sturdy American microbusiness.

In many ways, that really doesn’t matter.

Microbusinesses have managed to grow in number and increasing importance in the U.S. economy without a shred of support from the federal government and I would imagine they will continue to do so.

On the other hand, I’ll confess I’m disappointed.

I love research because it is the tool of science, which seeks to observe the world and to measure and explain what it sees.

But, of course, science is only as useful as the degree to which it remains connected to the real world. That is the real significance behind the phrase “fact based policy.”

On the one hand, it is possible to spend a lot of time and energy studying things that don’t matter. Except, of course, why would you? What would be the point?

In other words, microbusinesses are small and that’s why we don’t get what we need.

Except for those microbusinesses that are not small (in revenue, if not in head count). The high earners “prove” that success is possible with what’s already there, which is why we still don’t get what we need.

And, if we point out that those few high-earning microbusinesses are the exception that prove the rule, and that microbusinesses may be too low-revenue to care about but they are too numerous to ignore, we get vague promises that somebody will look into it.