In stirring up as much fear and loathing as possible, opponents of health care reform are appealing to the basest impulses that still live in the deepest tar pits in their followers’ hearts, impulses that most Americans comfortably believed we put behind us with the election of an African-American President.

The results have not been pretty.

I bring all this up because the results of the NASE survey covered in this week’s microbusiness news demonstrate that not even microbusiness owners (who are generally believed to be smarter than the average bear) are immune to this campaign of misinformation.

So, microbusiness owners, let the current episode of manipulative politics be a lesson to you.

On the one hand, everybody on Capitol Hill loves small businesses. Small businesses, any of them will tell you, will drag our collective chestnuts out of the recessionary fire and lead the way back to good times.

On the other hand, nobody on Capitol Hill seems to be willing to refer to the probable current surge in nonemployer businesses as a positive development. They know that “forced entrepreneurship” is happening. They view it as a sign of a poor economic environment.

After all, if all those people had jobs, then they wouldn’t need to … what? Become entrepreneurs?

I don’t mean that you can have the same kind and quality of influence as the corporate giants who fill the campaign coffers of politicians, directly or indirectly.

I mean that you can have influence because of something it won’t take you a second to understand: relationships.

The relationships you develop with your elected representatives and their staff can accomplish a great deal, if you give them sufficient time and attention.

Last night, I was a guest on Blog Talk Radio’s Coach for Innovation with Dee McCrory. The subject under discussion was microbusinesses and jobs and the future of the American workplace.

Dee and I talked for an hour. We could easily have talked for two. It’s a big subject.

I’ve been writing about that subject here and everywhere else I write for a long time. Lately, it’s been a regular topic.

This new recession is a really deep one, resulting in unprecedented numbers of long-term unemployed putting an unprecedented strain on that system of social safety nets I was talking about last week.

“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the article.

Nobody knows how long it’ll be before the jobs return but it’s pretty clear that what we’re doing right now — lurching along with these costly, last-minute extensions of unemployment insurance — is unsustainable.

Judging from this week’s news, you have to ask yourself if our nation’s leaders will, without possessing the vestige of a clue, end up destroying what they have not the wit to appreciate.

I’m talking about those proposed rules targeting firms and individuals (but mostly firms) that hire independent contractors.

Now, although this proposal is said to be a part of the President’s budget (and it is), it was actually proposed jointly by the Departments of Labor and the Treasury, and their respective Secretaries, Hilda Solis and Tim Geithner. They illustrate that mid-20th century political philosophies also are a poor fit for the way microbusinesses do business.

That is why it is sometimes said, among us microbusiness advocate types, that a small business with 40 employees has a lot more in common with a “small business” that has 400 employees than it does with a small business that has 4 employees.

The 4-person business, the microbusiness, is just too small to even have the option of approximating something like a large business. So, it’s owner has two options: grow enough to “fit in” or thumb your nose at all that and figure out something else.

Over the last twenty years or so, increasing numbers of microbusinesses have chosen to explore what’s behind Door Number Two.

We all know that it is not rational to expect the economy to go straight from ‘ew’ to awe in less than a month. And, while it might make sense to assume that things will be better in December 2010 than they were in January 2010, it will still take some time to get there.

So, while you are listening to various folks with various sorts of axes to grind, bear in mind that things are neither uniformly wonderful nor frighteningly terrible. It isn’t necessary to find deep meaning or predictive value in any particular set of tea-leaf substitutes.

Right now, it is what it is.

In some ways, it’s probably a good thing that the government doesn’t seem to have noticed any of this yet. If they had, they would almost certainly have decided to regulate it in some way, under the mistaken notion that all those poor freelancers need to be protected … whether they want to be protected or not.

At the same time, this new labor market movement could use some support — especially in this economy.

Part of the reason why they don’t know what to do is because the economy is not behaving the way it used to and nobody has appeared before them to explain how it is behaving now because nobody really knows.

Besides the incentives provided by campaign donations, lawmakers like to tinker with big companies at times like this because the big companies haven’t changed. They remain familiar and the lawmakers understand them.

The things they are doing for small businesses are only helping a small number of them because only a small number of them are still doing business in 20th century ways. They don’t know how we operate anymore and there aren’t enough of them who do their own tweeting for us to explain it to them.