As 2007 winds down, brace yourself: it's retrospective season.

Possibly you have noticed this, but I don't like retrospectives. Besides the fact that I don't always remember what was happening last week, let alone what happened back in January, they often seem to me to be more trouble than they are worth.

But there's more to it than editorial laziness.

Most of the time, the point of the whole Janus thing — the two faces, one looking ahead and one looking behind — is to look back and learn the lessons of the past while stepping forward into the future.

That is, in fact, an idea that holds a lot of appeal to me. But it only works when lessons were learned and that is something that doesn't seem to be happening in the microbusiness public policy landscape.

That fact was amply demonstrated by the shortcomings of the new and improved Energy Bill.

There are potentially a lot of things about that bill one might complain about but, on the whole, it doesn't really do anything that will prove terribly harmful to microbusinesses.

What it does do is display, just in case we needed further evidence, that most of Washington is out to lunch when it comes to how most of the people who do business are doing business in these United States.

For some reason, that bothers me.

And so, any retrospective I might write would no doubt have a snarky title like Same Stuff, Different Year. Or maybe Lather, rinse, repeat.

I don't do that because sometimes even I get tired of repeating myself.

The MicroEnterprise Journal will be on hiatus until January 7, 2008. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful, safe and peaceful holiday season.