To those of us who knew the pain
Of valentines that never came
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball
- Janice Ian

Sometimes, nothing says it quite like a song.

So people in Washington are concerned about whether small businesses are getting what they need in order to lead the way from recession to recovery or, as Senate Small Business Committee Chairwoman Mary Landrieu put it, to part the clouds and make the sun shine.

And they’re back with their usual bag of tricks.

Small businesses will need to sell to the federal government because the federal government buys more of everything than everybody. In order to expand their capacity to sell to the federal government, small businesses need to borrow money.

Then they’ll create a mess of jobs, which will get all those unemployed people off our backs. And you wonder why we love small businesses!

But will they? The prediction that this will be another jobless recovery is still with us and, if that’s the case, then policy makers seem to be barking up a whole forest full of the wrong tree.

So, instead of looking at what used to happen during recessions, how about if we look at what is happening now?

A lot of very small companies might be ready to start hiring again but they aren’t getting any support because they don’t leverage their way to prosperity. They prefer to sell their way to prosperity, bootstrapping and otherwise internally financing what they need. They also don’t sell to the feds; everybody tells them that they can’t and most of them don’t want to anyway.

And there’s the millions of new nonemployer firms that we’re going to find out about over the next couple of years. If you’re looking for job creation right now, that’s where you’ll find it.

Neither of those two groups of small businesses seem to have been invited to the Recovery Party. Even though it seems pretty likely that these are the two groups who will really lead us out of this recession. Even if they do so in ways that policy makers don’t appear to recognize.

Sometimes it really does seem like they don’t want us on their team.