This is empirically dubious. For all that people can be divided by class and wealth, increasing exchanges tends to increase peace and mutual prosperity. Countries that trade do not fight each other, and people who trade generally have good relationships. The reason is that the exchanges are mutually beneficial: both parties trade a good they value less for a good they value more. Neither wants to jeopardize the relationship.
You blame money for the predicament of those unsatisfied with their lives, but few take the risks necessary to find a better paying job, or to gain the skills necessary to make themselves more valuable in the market, and more proximately few make the sacrifices necessary to accumulate a savings that would buffer them against the risks of a transition. Other loci of blame are the cartels that fix pricing on services, that prohibit trade, that over-regulate markets to the detriment of the fluidity and freedom that make the market work. The market economy has clearly created a lot of good, why condemn the whole system over the imperfect margins?
Humans have innate economic intuitions, meaning that they appraise the fairness of exchanges without being taught to do so, or even told to do so in a given instance. This is true of many if not all apes and monkeys. Humans also spontaneously engage in exchanges, trading one thing of value for another. By “spontaneously,” I mean without being forced to or instructed to or how. Children begin trading e.g. food items from a young age. This is a direct rebuttal to the claim that “[h]uman beings are not naturally inclined to work for others”: “work[ing] for others” is just an exchange of values, with one party offering goods (or their abstraction) in exchange for the time, energy, or skill of another. There is nothing particularly “unnatural” about this exchange, and it is founded on instinctive economic mechanisms.
I don’t think that’s true. Ants and bees are slaves to their queens. If you discount this form of slavery, I think it would be because you include in slavery certain mental characteristics that will exclude any non human animals not by virtue of their conduct, but by virtue of their limited cognition.
Equal value as defined by who? If no one is willing to give a person more than x for a certain good (where x is a quantity of goods or an abstraction of their value), in what sense can it be said that the value of the good is greater than x? The value of a good is not an objective quality of it; it’s defined economically relative to other goods by a collection of exchanges.
There are times when that mechanism breaks down, and in particular a monopsony will undervalue a good, in that the single buyer would be willing to pay more for the good, but does not have to because she knows that sellers are choosing between underselling and not selling at all. Even still, the prices must be higher than the value of the goods to the seller, or else he will just choose to keep the goods rather than exchanging them.
In any case, the existence of market failures is well known, and relatively rigorously defined. The seeming allegation in the latter half of this thread that the market always fails is untenable, at least on the scant rhetorical evidence offered in support of it.
Elaborate?