The Internet: Blessings, Courtesy of the Free Market

It is an astonishing time we live in although it is easy enough to take it for granted. Most people would not appreciate that the poorest American today lives a far better and more comfortable life than the richest American a hundred years ago. By any measure: life expectancy, health, access to sophisticated technology including life-saving medical devices and pharmaceuticals, handy comforts and devices, food, clothing, heating, cooling, electricity, lights, refrigeration, transportation, powerful computers that the poorest among us now hold in our hands, and so on, speak to an endlessly transformative economic system known as the free market, which continues to dazzle and improve our lives.

         One of the greatest of these developments has been the internet. Overnight, as it were, untold volumes of information have become available to us at virtually no cost, with the click of a finger on a smart device or other computer. There are many benefits to this, but one of the most important is the ease with which any of us can start a business, an online business, with relatively minimal costs: a domain, hosting service, and website; then marketing your product online, through social media, email, and so forth, and, of course, monetizing it in someway, if possible, generally by deploying good and appealing content, goods, and services - on a steady basis.

         None of this is terribly costly, just time, labor, imagination, and marketing.  But contemplate the price tag in starting a business pre-internet. It would require an office, phone and fax lines, furniture, printers, employees, rent, insurance, equipment, supplies, advertising, and so on: the expense and overhead would put it out of reach for many if not most people, regardless of how creative the business idea or content might have been.

         Writers, columnists, novelists, bloggers, commentators, essayists, fiction, non-fiction, professional, trade, artistic, fantasy, have opportunities to develop, promote, and publish their work with an ease that would have been unreachable to writers of yesteryear - and in any genre or style: a plethora of subjects, perspectives, styles, and agendas that would have been unthinkable before. It is a new writer's market that, thanks to American ingenuity and the free enterprise system, any such vagabond scribe can now join.

         The writer's journey can be taken by anyone with the will, wit, skill, and desire to ascend it. Or any business or creative journey for that matter. The world has opened.

Dr. Richard Moss is a board certified head and neck cancer surgeon and was a candidate for Congress in 2016 and 2018. He graduated from the Indiana University School of Medicine and has been in practice in Jasper and Washington, IN for over 20 years. He is married with four children. 

Dr. Moss is the author or “A Surgeon’s Odyssey” and “Matilda’s Triumph” available on amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble in Evansville, IN.  For more information visit richardmossmd.com.  Find Richard Moss, M.D. on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.