Eating and apple and pooping out the seeds might grow new trees, but none of those trees are likely to make apples like you ate.
Money is a convenient way to trade your work or skills for someone else’s. Like the guy who grafts apple tree scions together to make the apples that taste good grow in their orchard.
Now when the guy who knows how to grow hood apple trees decides he doesn’t want to compete against anybody else’s apples and squashes them, we have problems, and need rules to keep that from happening.