I would imagine by now that you must be used to the way my hair catches fire when I learn of somebody else who has publicly slighted the vast sea of nonemployer microbusinesses that comprise most U.S. firms.

I refer, of course, to the research report stating that self-employed people often do not go on to start businesses.

Speaking personally, I fail to see the difference between being self employed and operating a nonemployer business. But for them, nonemployers are not real businesses.

Can it be that there are some who consider that the purpose of a business is not to add value to the economy but, more simply, to create jobs? And thus that any economic entity that does not create jobs is not a ‘business,' regardless of how much value said entity adds to the economy?

That must be it. That is the only practical difference between employer firms and nonemployers.

But that only brings us back to the issue of creating work versus creating jobs, doesn't it? And that, in its turn, brings me back to Gayle Buske.

Not to beat a dead horse to death, but Gayle Buske's virtual staffing agency, Team Double-Click, finds work for hundreds of people around the country, stimulating local economies all over the place, and earning too much revenue to even be counted by the Census Bureau as a nonemployer business.

She does all that without creating one single ‘job.'

I suspect that Gayle would be astonished to discover that she does not operate a real business.

I have to wonder what is the point of any kind of research on small businesses that excludes 80% of the small businesses in the country, with the glib but lame explanation that they are somehow not real businesses.

More importantly, I have to wonder how long it's going to be before somebody notices that they're missing something. Because if you're going to write off nonemployers as non- businesses that don't count, then eventually you'll find there is quite a lot going on in this 21st century economy that you don't understand.

And what do you do then?