I’m glad there is no money in the Federation. Unless you count credits. Which are not money. Unless you use thousands of them to pay the Barzans. Or give them to Starfleet officers to buy things like tribbles and drinks at Quark’s.
I’m glad there is no money in the Federation. Unless you count credits. Which are not money. Unless you use thousands of them to pay the Barzans. Or give them to Starfleet officers to buy things like tribbles and drinks at Quark’s.
But then we have this problem dialogue from First Contact:
You could argue that he was simplifying things, but I think Picard would have understood that Lily was smart enough to not make that necessary. He could have just as easily said just said the “economics of the future are somewhat different” part without the money part and the whole section of dialogue would have made much more sense. Saying that money doesn’t exist is pretty much just a lie.
So I still maintain that none of it makes sense because it’s all contradictory.
I’ve always been interested by his family winery and the family who’ve worked for his family for generations. Like who owns the land? What do the workers get for working? If real organic wine is a premium product that can’t be adequately replicated does that hint at a two-tier market?
I’m wondering why anyone would be a waiter in Sisko’s father’s restaurant in New Orleans.
“This is the Federation, son! It’s a cashless society! There’s a vast galaxy out there! You can be whatever you want to be when you grow up!”
“I wanna be a waiter at a New Orleans creole food restaurant.”
“…”
“And work for a big old jerk!”
“Okay, we’re going to get you DNA tested because I’m thinking I’m not your real father.”
In a civilisation that can beam food to your table a waiter is a performer, not service staff. And I do believe there are some entertainers who would find satisfaction in putting on a performance for an audience of two, whose attention is going to be somewhere else most of the time.
Presumably the Picard family owns the land. That’s why the Federation isn’t truly post-scarcity. They can’t replicate more wine estates in the French countryside. Nor chalets in the Alps, nor beach houses in Southern California.
Some people have those things. Others don’t. Maybe everyone gets a tiny apartment in NYC with a replicator and holosuite. I’d pass on that. I can’t stand being around people too much. I’d rather be working my own garden in the countryside, getting lots of fresh air and taking walks in the forest.
You can say that they will have holo versions of the countryside but we all know it’s not the same. Every time a character has wanted to spend all their time on the holodeck they were treated as having a mental illness or some kind of trauma and subjected to an intervention.
Gardening on the holodeck is no more meaningful than gardening in Stardew Valley and everybody knows it. That’s why real land like the Picard family owns has real value, and everything you can produce with a replicator and every experience you can have on the holodeck is ultimately meaningless. You might as well be living off food stamp-provided microwave dinners and playing video games all day, something you can do right now.
As for the real “meaningful” activity of traipsing around the galaxy meeting aliens and risking death every week, I think most people today would view that as incredibly reckless and irresponsible behaviour. The Enterprise is a ship full of families, not just crew! Why are they always taking them into mortal danger?
I imagine it works the way sovereign citizens think it does. The Federation maintains trade within itself and other entities. A kind of fungibility has been established to facilitate that trade. Those units of fungibility, or ‘credits’, are given to citizens when they need to engage in extra-federation trade. Every citizen is probably guaranteed some portion of the total fungible capacity of the Federation for personal use.