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.

I guess I don’t even need to tell you this but I don’t see any of that when I look at these numbers.

What I see instead are a lot of federal and state lawmakers — you know, the ones who constantly prate on and on about how small businesses are the engine of our economy — who are failing miserably and don’t appear to know it.

Half of the nation’s sole proprietorships earned less than $10,000 in receipts in 2005. That is a statistic that should make everybody at the Small Business Administration and every other small business support agency hang their heads in deep shame.

Right now, corporate America is trying to figure out how to marry sustainability with profit because, in corporate America, some things never change.

I don’t know how that’s going to work out for them because I don’t know how you wed the sort of thinking that considers the planet to be precious with the sort of thinking that favors plundering the planet for profit — that is, the sort of thinking that got us here to begin with.

All of which brings up a fairly obvious notion: every business owner, at a certain point in the life of his or her business, must decide whether to pursue growth or sustainability.

Growth is the way of the 20th Century Rapacious Consumption Economy. In some circles, rumor has it that we are supposed to be trying to leave that stuff behind us, for the sake of our planet and for the sake of our household levels of indebtedness.

Sustainable is the way of the 21st Century Recently Conscientious Economy, the one that says it is possible for us to meet our material needs without rendering our planet uninhabitable and desirable for us each to have ‘enough’ and no more.

In many ways, microbusinesses have less to do with economic issues than they have to do with social issues. They are built to create a life rather than merely creating an asset. And their existence is often more about now than later.

That is the Great Microbusiness Crime against the economy, the reason why we are shunned, dismissed and ignored.

Because we value our lives above our wealth.

If anything, technology has made it seem more possible for one person — a nonemployer business — to make a lot more money than they really need. But, making it more possible does not necessarily make it any more desirable.

All of which explains why nonemployer businesses remain in the dog house as far as almost everybody in the small business sphere is concerned.

If there is a single industry sector in which one expects to find microbusinesses — other than professional and technical services, that is — it is probably the information technology sector. Part of the reason for that is has to do with the sorts of Heroes of Capitalism myths and stories with which we Americans [...]

Most microbusiness owners are entirely willing to grant to the ambitious their perfect right to lust after fame, fortune and all the influence they can peddle.

It’s too bad the ambitious often can’t seem to grasp that not everyone shares their ambition. And, perhaps much more to the point, that there’s nothing wrong with that.