*Typically the transactions are characterized as between a buyer (who might value a pair of sunglasses at $90) and a seller (who might be able to produce it for $30), but that need not be the case. It is simply any exchange between any two actors who value things differently.
*I still get confusion because people argue that many people have no money, so allocating goods by money prices is unfair and unjust. But once you understand that money simply represents goods and services that you have produced, and that are found to be valuable by your fellow citizens, you are partway to addressing this dilemma. Everyone has the ability to produce – and the natural state of nature is non-production – it is poverty. Wealth and happiness is not an entitlement, they can only be possible when you take efforts to produce things of value (broadly defined too). The collectivists among us run away from this reality by talking about “causes of poverty” as if nothingness has a cause. Wealth and somethingness is the thing to be explained, and it is up to the astute reader to understand what things make it difficult for people to move from a state of nothingness and into a state of somethingness.
