Comment on Was it a good thing that SNW explicitly said the Federation is socialist?
MudMan@fedia.io 5 months agoI'm a bit shocked that nobody has pointed out the obvious:
The economics of Star Trek are super inconsistent and make no sense because multiple writers had a crack and they each liked and believed different things.
Sometimes it's a post-scarcity socialist utopia where money is obsolete. Other times, Picard invites someone out for a date and she answers "you buying?".
This is obvious enough that multiple people have tried to fix it, which as always in franchise worldbuilding only makes things less consistent and more complicated. So now some things just can't be properly replicated. Sometimes it's because of regulations and laws, other times it's because of technology limitations. Sometimes the Federation doesn't use money but they still have it for trade, other times they use money, just for random commodities.
The middle of the road for Trek seems to be some form of socialdemocracy where you're provided with anything you need and labor is largely vocational, but out in space there is enough variation over time and different areas that there is still a bit of a pseudo-capitalist economy even in regions where Federation-level post-scarcity tech is still available. Go in any more detail and the whole thing breaks down.
This goes for other political elements of the series, too. Picard gets super mad at the notion of endorsing religious beliefs in a prewarp society because he finds it barbaric. Meanwhile, Sisko is out there becoming Bajoran Space Jesus and everybody is just cool with that.
It's almost like Rick Berman's, Ronald D. Moore's and Gene Roddenberry's political beliefs were different from each other's, huh?
batmaniam@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That and post-scarcity doesn’t mean “zero scarcity”. Like if someone wanted to create a picard funkpop the size of a planet, I don’t think they’d be allowed the resource budget.
It’s like how it doesn’t matter where you live, if you want to buy on the silk road, you need bitcoin. Presumably even the federation can’t just make latinum whenever they please, or we wouldn’t see them haggle with it. Although, it would be fun to see that they could and just take the responsibility of not crashing non-federation cultures entire economies very seriously, either out of respect or treaty.
Damnit, I want a LD episode where the crew is frustrated and desperately wants to just “buy” their problem away but can’t because an economist at command says it’ll mean they have to rescue all these non-federation colonies that are currently self sufficient. Come to think of it it’s right there with the “you break it you own it” concept of the prime directive.