Civilization is all about institutions, isn't it?

Institutions provide the framework, the infrastructure, within which we operate when we want to do something important.

We have institutions that we use when we want to create families (yet another institution) or sell property or buy into a business. And, thanks to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, we have an infrastructure within which to launch and grow a small business.

The small business infrastructure happens like all infrastructure happens, when legislatures pass laws and agencies write rules to implement those laws.

And it works nicely because, when a problem gets big enough to impact large numbers of participants in that particular institution, it can often be fixed with a single tweak or two.

I bring all this up because, right now, our country is faced with a problem if which it is surprisingly unaware.

The problem is that we have a finely tuned economic infrastructure, including a separate small business infrastructure, but most of the businesses in the country do not fit anywhere in that infrastructure anymore.

Most U.S. businesses, being microbusinesses, don't fit into the financing infrastructure or the labor infrastructure or the tax infrastructure ... or anywhere else, really.

The weirdest thing about that is, as I said, that the folks best equipped to address that problem don't seem to have noticed.

Eventually, no doubt that problem will be solved. Due to the vigilance of the few advocates that microbusinesses have, bits and pieces of infrastructure, like the two single-page tax bills covered in this week's newsletter, will be constructed.

In some ways, I suppose it's appropriate that these changes are happening in such hyper-small increments, since we're talking about hyper-small businesses.

Even in an era that calls itself one of sweeping change, there will be nothing sweeping about building the microbusiness infrastructure.

It's just that it will look like sweeping change because most of it will be built when nobody's looking.