First of all, to regular readers, sorry about the lull in posts. I've been busy trying to make my rent for next month which means doing things other than this site. The good news is that I should get there.

It seems that I am moving from being unemployed to being self-employed. I've written about business ideas for unemployed people. That was sort of a practical guide. Now I want to go into the business climate today and how it actually presents opportunities for the jobless.

We now have the opportunity to both witness and participate in the evolution of business, especially entrepreneurial business -- you know, the real kind, the kind that made America great (as opposed to the Monopoly money game that dragged us down).

It seems to me that this is a time of great paradox in the commercial world.

On one hand, a mind boggling amount of wealth has flowed upward into very few hands over the past ten years. (Few people fully understand this because they either don't know the facts or can't wrap their heads around the numbers, but essentially what has happened is that a great deal of middle class wealth has evaporated upward to the billionaires.) Credit is tight, and it is extremely difficult to get capital to fund a new venture.

On the other hand, technology has leveled the playing field and profoundly altered the landscape of commerce. Back in the industrial age, if you wanted to do business, you needed a lot of capital: equipment, land, factories, workers whom you could afford to pay (yes, workers are capital -- human capital), etc. Of course that stuff still comes in handy, but small fry can jump in and compete in a way that was impossible in the olden days. Build a better mousetrap and the world really does beat a path to your door now.

Take Google for an obvious example. Google started as two guys with a great idea and one computer. It grew organically from a small and enthusiastic base of tech-savvy people (Yours Truly humbly included) to the general public. Once widely adopted, monetization was easy. Once the money started flowing, it nourished the business into the behemoth it is today.

Ironically, Google started during the infancy of the dot-com frenzy but was never itself part of that. Google did not go public until well after the dot-com bubble had burst. When it did go public, it did so on its own terms and leveled the playing field so that ordinary investors had the same advantages as big investors. That actually ended up driving the value of the stock higher. Those people who jumped in early on Google are happy campers today.

The point is: The value creation came first, and business followed naturally from that.

What does this mean for unemployed people? Obviously, we're not all going to grow into the next Google. Some of us will but not most of us.

Thanks to technology, barriers to entry are low in many sectors, notably retail and manufacturing. (You still won't be able to start your own airline.) There are a ton of opportunities to start businesses now and not just in technology. Any skill can be transformed into a product or service that the market demands. Nimble new industries are going to rise up and replace the old ones. Coal and nuclear, for example, will be replaced by renewable energy one way or another because that is what the market demands AND because the new technologies are far more economical. You don't need a few billion dollars to build a power plant. You can build your own solar panels (paid affiliate link) for under a thousand dollars. You can build them for other people at a profit. If a thousand people go into that type of businesses -- and they will -- they will replace a big power plant every few months.

That's just one example. Cottage industries are set to take off right now. People could knit scarves, build bird feeders, or produce any of a thousand items and sell them on the Internet. You don't even need a retail space, although you could certainly re-invest your initial profits into ramping up production and renting physical retail space if you were so inclined. If people like your scarves, your business can grow just like Google's did -- organically. This doesn't mean that everyone who can knit will get rich, just that opportunities to make money exist for anyone who can produce value.

Everyone can produce value. Beautifully, it seems to me most people produce the most value when doing something that they enjoy. Can your passion be profitable? Probably.

I hope that planted seeds that will grow into a business for somebody out there.