Y’know how the Federation–or human civilization at any rate–doesn’t have money on Star Trek?
That’s soooo stupid.
And originally, it wasn’t that way. In the original series, there are periodic references to money. Sure, they call their units of money "credits" rather than "dollars" or "yen" or what have you, but it’s money. There are also references to traders, commerce, and even mail-order brides.
And then came what should have been a throwaway line.
In the movie Star Trek IV ("The Search For Whales"), Kirk and the gang are back in the 20th century (remember that one?) and Kirk is going on a sort of date/business meeting with a marine biologist to a pizzeria, and he explains that he’s from the future. She is incredulous and not taking him very seriously, and then when the time comes to pay the check, she says, "I suppose that you don’t have money in the future."
Kirk replies, "As a matter of fact, we don’t."
Funny line! Good delivery by Shatner. And if it had stopped there, everything would have been fine. The line could have been taken as a joke, or it could have been taken as a statement that in the future nobody carries cash (i.e., they all use debit cards or something).
Unfortunately, the Powers That Be at Star Trek chose to take it in a much more literal sense (probably dictated by Gene Roddenberry’s over-optimistic secular humanism), and so it became canon that they don’t have money at all in human civilization. Instead, as articulated in Next Gen and DS9, the human race abandoned money for an economy driven by a mutual desire for improving oneself and the common good.
Riiiight.
All those greedy traders from the original series like Cyrano Jones and Harry Mudd were driven by a desire for mutual self improvement. That’s what led them to unleash ecologically unsafe life forms (tribbles), traffic in contraband substances (magic beauty crystal drug thingies), and risk jail and stuff.
The difficulty of making Star Trek over into a Leninist workers paradise has problems that go way beyond continuity problems, though. The basic problem is that Leninist workers paradises don’t work. That’s why the Soviet Union early on abandoned its efforts to have a cashless society and reintroduced the use of money.
Money plays a vital role: It tells you how much somebody wants something that is in short supply. Person A wants to have something that Person B also wants to have (say, a nice fluffy tribble that has been safely neutered). Who wants it more? Money is the best way to settle that. (Fisticuffs not being a good way.) You want this tribble? How much are you willing to pay for it? Supply and demand.
Even monkeys can get the principles involves.
A society of humans couldn’t be more advanced than us and yet lack money. Whether cash or electronic, money is the most efficient way of settling how wants what how much and thus who gets it. It’s the best way to organize resources on a wide scale. Any other system is going to be inefficient and result in the misallocation of resources and greater human suffering.
Star Trek is able to ignore this because it is held to such low standards of realism, but no human society built on a touchie-feelie, moneyless self improvement philosophy could possibly work. We know. We’ve tried them. They all fall apart (usually very quickly). Even the kibbutzim are either changing or dying.
Even with the low-realism standards of Star Trek, though, the problem shows through. There are episodes of DS9 (whose writers hated the moneyless business) where the problem is thrown into sharp relief. How could it not be?–when some of the principal characters on the show are Ferengi and thus devoted to the pursuit of money.
One of the things that the show just has to ignore is how moneyless humans interact with moneyed Ferengi (and other cultures). Think Quark isn’t going to charge humans for drinks in his bar? Or to use his holosuites? Think again.
This is not to say that the economics of the future wouldn’t look different than ours. Technological change alone would ensure that. If you have replicator technology (which didn’t come in until Next Gen) and abundant energy then the unit cost of countless consumer goods is going to be vanishingly low (even if replicated food doesn’t taste as good as real food), but it will still exist.
And so what should have been a fun, throwaway line in a movie about searching for whales turned into a HUGE, HULKING, ENORMOUS, WHALE-SIZED WRITING PROBLEM FOR THE FRANCHISE.
Sigh.