If the U.S. Congress were run like a business, it probably would have been downsized to 20 or 30 members by now, rather than the 535 who occupy space in the Capitol. After all, it takes only a couple dozen legislators to accomplish the work Congress actually gets done.

Congress, for better or worse, is not run like a business, which is why we’re once again confronted with the spectacle of a needless government shutdown. No viable company would arbitrarily shut itself down, leaving customers, suppliers and employees in the lurch. To members of Congress, however, these are minor inconveniences compared with the urgent national need to draw attention to themselves. When companies are forced to shut down, it’s usually dire. But when Washington shuts down, it’s a tactic.

You and I voted for these jokers, so it seems like an opportune moment to examine ways in which the politicians we send to Washington live in a taxpayer-funded utopia in which normal workplace rules don’t apply. Here are

By Ben Evans

Benedict Evans is a strategy consultant at Enders Analysis in London. Read his excellent blog here.

This Google (GOOG) Trends chart provides a neat shorthand illustration of the rise and fall of five different social networks. All of these had strong lock-in effects. All of them thought that there were barriers to switching away. All thought that people would not want to abandon their history of photos, interactions and tags. But when it came to it, people just walked away from all of that accumulated history and adopted a new platform.

I've been wondering how broadly applicable this message is. How much value do ordinary people place on their email history, for example? At least half of the subscribers to my newsletter are using Gmail, and in the tech world we tend to think of such things as extremely sticky. But real people walk away from services that they're supposedly locked into with disconcerting ease. And when a corporate person (as opposed to a VC or