Fascinating bit of dialogue from “Star Trek: First Contact”:
Lily: How much did this [ship] cost?
Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th Century.
Lily: You mean you don’t get paid?
Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.
Yeah, right.
I can accept force fields, transporters, phasers and Tribbles, but no money? I don’t think so. I could accept it for the Federation crew – they’re essentially in the military, after all, and would be used to spartan quarters and comforts. But for the rest of humanity, I just don’t buy it (pun somewhat intended). No matter how filled with goodness people in the future will be, they’ll still want to buy a fancy car.
Trek is very inconsistent about that issue, too. They say there’s no money but then you hear about credits and gold-pressed latinum, et cetera. They abandon the no money idea whenever they need a plot device.
I’m a geek.
So what they’re saying is that the Federation is a huge Communist state, which is why they can feel so superior to those money-grubbing Ferengi …
This rang a bell, in retrospect, so I found some interesting blogs from some months ago on this, including here (which refers to the Federation as a “an authoritarian collectivist quasi-communist society (the government is clearly paramilitary) with a totally non-monetary command economy.”
I might accept that people would hold certain jobs for the love of them — artists, scientists, etc. Others, like the ST crew, might hold dangerous jobs out of a sense of duty to mankind. Sure.
But if mankind is guaranteed a rather decent standard of living, I think we’re going to have quite a labor shortage in the shit-job industry. What motivates the people at the counter at Ten-Forward, for christ’s sake?