Ready to take an ax to the system.Like most progressive, levy-loving Seattleites, we tend to tune out the incessant whine of the business lobby complaining about government. “Waste, mismanagement, squandering our tax dollars, overpaid bureaucrats, the private sector does everything better, blah blah.” It’s a predictable monotone.But sometimes a sliver of truth emerges from all that bluster. And Washington’s workers’ compensation system, which pays for the medical care and lost wages of injured employees, is a case in point. Boeing cited the system’s high cost as one of the reasons for taking its Dreamliner assembly plant to South Carolina. And smaller employers, like logger Gabe Rygaard (at right), are feeling the pain even more keenly.As Laura Onstot describes in her great feature story this week, workers’ comp in Washington is generous to a fault, handing out lifetime disability checks to far more people than most other states–including to one of the loggers currently appearing with Rygaard on the History Channel’s Ax Men.