Now I'm wondering, the first news papers were sold out on the street. How long was it before there were ads in them? And was there the same intellectual hand-wringing about it at the time?
The first newspaper ad was for a book and in the 1620s. I am not certain about intellectual handwringing but there were people who considered making money through commerce at all as morally wrong due to it involving neither toil as they recognized it nor might-makes-right. Based upon some truly stupid ideas of "fair price" and assumptions of fixed universal prices meaning that any merchant had to be a scammer.
