Nobody cares about microbusinesses but me, I tell myself. I don’t even know why I bother.

Of course, I know better than that. Some people do care about microbusinesses, quite a few of them in fact. On days when I’m feeling less whiny, I know that.

But I am as subject to those feel-sorry-for-yourself days as the next guy, days when it seems like my newsletters are a complete waste of time and when I start to think that between them the large corporate interests and the lawmakers they’ve bought will somehow manage to keep the meek from inheriting the earth — or, at least, the economy — as scheduled.

But you cannot say this often enough: Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants.

Yeah, we have to rely on people who are now elementary students or on people we import from overseas because, naturally, those of us who were born here and have already grown to adulthood are entirely lacking in smarts, creativity, inspiration or the stomach to take a risk.

Well, gee willies, Tom. What about the rest of us? Or don’t we count?

It’s been said that doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, is a sign of insanity.

Congress does that all the time but nobody seems to think lawmakers are uniformly insane — well, except for the cranky, paranoid, political fringe nut-cases, of course.

The issue of federal procurement is a good example.

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.