The only way to understand the Bureaubrain is to slice it in half and stare at it. So . . .

Way back in the last century (specifically, 1999) people were guffawing at Gore for claiming he'd invented the Internet. What Al actually averred was, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Close enough for Virginia Postrel to affix her then Reason Editor's finger on the emblematic mindset of the ruling class: If government doesn't do it, it doesn't exist. She described the statist state of mind in an editorial thusly: "It's as though an important technological development does not really exist until it has been ratified by lavish subsidies and an act of Congress -- until it has come to the official attention of people like Sen. Albert Gore Jr."

Little has changed in a century (well, specifically, in five years). Office of National Drug Controlling Potentates deputy directorcrat Dr. Andrea Barthwell scampered off to Connecticut recently to stick her national nose into what should have been strictly state stuff -- legalizing medical marijuana. Her testimony? According to NBC30.com: "The crude plant is not a medicine," she said, noting that other drugs have gone through rigorous FDA tests. "Marijuana has not passed those tests."

Hence the Bureaubrain at work: government says it's not medicine so it's not medicine.

You can't be an Indian tribe either, unless government says so. Which means you can't run a casino and make millions. You can sell doughnuts at freeway rest stops and make crumbs, but you can't run casinos. Like the Chinooks. On the very same day, specifically, January 3, 2001, one set of Bureaubrains shook the Chinooks' hands and welcomed them into bureaucratically legitimate tribalhood while another treated the Chinooks like schnooks by denying them the right to officially call themselves a tribe. Which means they don't exist. Which means they can't run casinos.

So what was the problem? It's not as though Roaring Chicken and Kissing Squaw suddenly showed up and said, "Hey, we're Hekawi Indians and we're real. Just watch these old F-Troop reruns." The Chinook have been a tribe for hundreds of years. What was missing?

According to the Bureaubrains, continuity. Steve Austin (not the Six Million Dollar Man but the former Bureau of Indian Affairs anthropologist of course) says the Chinook were cookin' until 1880, then disappeared as a tribe, not to reemerge until 1970. Which prompts the question: So what? The Cleveland Indians haven't done much better and they're still "The Tribe." But the missing ninety years was the big disqualifier. As Austin (the anthropologist) explained to the Seattle Times: "It was too long for us to basically overlook. There was no evidence of community. There was no evidence of governing authority over the people."

Aha! Now we get it, don't we? "No evidence of governing authority." A tribe can't be a tribe if they don't have bureaucrats. (Sitting Bullcrat? Running Deercrat?) And why did they disappear as a tribe for nine decades in the first place? Because of, among other reasons, American government bureaucrats. Because Native American children were kidnapped en masse by Bureaubrains and forcibly reeducated in boarding schools to become good little white children.

So now that we know how the BureauBrain malfunctions, we can tell what's slowing down the economic recovery.

Seems the Bureau (that word again) of Labor Statistics is very good at counting the noses of established workers in established jobs in established industries, but are blind to self employed folks and partners in unincorporated businesses. So auto assemblers are employed but the owner of Otto's repair shop isn't; Steel workers are working but the Steele Bros. Lawnmower Repair doesn't exist. The BLS also can't count 200,000 massage therapists or 300,000 manicurists. (Hey, if I were making this up I'd have said 800,000 professional dwarf-tossers!) Which brings me full circle -- quoting Paige McKenzie in her NewsMax article quoting Virginia Postrel in her "The Future and Its Enemies" book: "In every booming job category I looked at, official surveys were missing thousands of jobs."

You're not employed unless government says you're employed. Therefore, bad economy.

So how do the Bureaubrains account for their own existence? Would they not exist if their parents hadn't conceived them in state-sanctioned marriages? If they hadn't gone to tax-funded schools and eaten FDA approved food and lived in code enforced houses in city-zoned neighborhoods and slept on carefully maintained "do not remove tag under penalty of law" mattresses?

They exist, apparently, only because government says they exist.

How very existential.