Like someone else mentioned, I'm sure that the way money works in the future, or rather compensation for work done, is that you work if you want extra stuff. Otherwise you just get what the state gives you. I bet there are millions of Federation citizens who have nice apartments, eat nutritional food everyday and simply do hobbies in order to fill the time. Probably billions, even. You can rest easy in the loving embrace of the Federation, or you can go out a take a chance. Were do the Federation get all of it's colonists from? They probably were one of those pampered citizens who suddenly decided that they'd like to shake things up by trying life on a frontier planet.

That's actually similar to Mr. b's theory, mrow. He was postulating that instead of actually getting rid of homelessness and bums and drug addicts and whatnot, they're all living in the standard issue Federation housing facility, receiving the standard issue living stipend, standard issue replicator food, standard issue transportation. So you don't see them out on the streets, under bridges, along train tracks.

Yuck. Doesn't sound utopian to me. And you gotta expect lots of people would be unhappy.

Silly, nelamm. That's what the drugs are for.

In the context of ST, that sounds like the fascist-form of socialism. Private industry and the individual aren't property of the State as in communism, but the State is the primary customer and consumer in the national economy. While the State doesn't own the means of production, it controls the distribution through purchasing the vast majority of the goods and services, redistributes it to the people as "benefits", and pays for it with high tax-rates or labor service-rates from both producers and comsumers. Sounds like Star Fleet and the Federation.

The future as a triumph of liberal-socialism, governed by a meritocracy. "The needs of the Many out-weigh the needs of the Few" is the mantra of classical Socialism, along with "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". Both sound like they should be carved over the gates of the Star Fleet Academy.

It's one of the faces of the ST-universe that I've never liked or approved-of.

What I dislike about the whole "there is no money in the future" is that it doesn't matter.
From rounding up an asteroid to repicate into a hull to polishing the Ent D model in Picard's quarters you would need to feed all the humans who are working on this project. Money is mainly just a way of measuring labor and comparing relative values of completely different items.
Also if making ships is so damned cheap why does the UFP have so few of them throughout all of the shows?
This is just more of Roddenberry's half ass writing. He thinks that money is evil so the future has no money but he was too lazy to think it through.

It's not like we don't use money in the future, either. We use gold-pressed latinum all over the place. It's just one of the things the shows try to not think about at all.

I kind of like the "personal betterment" angle. If I can accept warp fields and time travel, I'm prepared to accept that the Federation has somehow developed or discovered some unknown economic innovation that induces federation citizens to actually work towards personal betterment even without money.

I assume there is some resource allocation system, though. If someone wants his own runabout, he probably can't have it, but if he invents some great system to restart a star, he can requisition the Enterprise and all its crew.

Which may work within the Federation, but it doesn't work outside the Federation when interacting with societies that still use money. This is evident all through DS9 with the Ferengi, and even in that episode where Jake and Nog try to get the baseball card for Sisko.

It's also apparent that this is a fairly late development - in the TOS ep "The Trouble With Tribbles" (which happened to have been on Sci-Fi the other day), Uhura took Chekov with her to K-7 to help her shop. Later, in the bar, they're discussing the price for a tribble (of course, long before they discovered the tribble's - er - unique breeding system). Jones and the barkeep agreed on a rate of 6 credits per tribble, which te barkeep was going to mark up to 10 per for sale (except Jones gave his sample tribble to Uhura, so we never got to see how she carried the money).

See, that part makes perfect sense. I can totally see phyiscal money disappearing completely. For me, it mostly has anyway. I can walk around for 2 months with the same cash sitting in my wallet. I pay for stuff with credit cards and then pay my credit card bills online. Once they come up with an easy and convenient way to transfer money electronically between people, physical money could theoretically disappear completely.

Assuming that Federation human nature is such that the citizens don't get greedy, I assume the Federation just pays for stuff its citizens get from cash-based societies. The idea that the Federation is paying goes a long way to explain why so many people hang out in Quark's when the replimat is free and the senior staff has replicators in their rooms.

My fanwank for In the Cards is that Jake doesn't have enough of a "Federation allowance" to bid for the cards.

But doesn't Jake specifically say something like "We're Federation citizens. We don't have money."?

But then the Federation would need money, and where would they get it if their society doesn't have it/use it?

Yeah, he does.

Maybe the Federation's replicators can create (alien) currencies, which its citizens then use when appropriate? Seems to me that it'd be much easier than creating food and clothing out of thin air.

If foreign currencies were replicatable, they would be worthless. Isn't that why they used latinum as a currency? It wasn't replicatable?

I can no idea whether latinum is replicat-able or not. But again, it seems easier than creating food or other organic materials out of thin air.

I know expanding the money supply at will makes no sense. Maybe the Federation government keeps track of how much currency its citizens replicate (even if they don't necessarily note how its used), and compensate various foreign banks periodically.

Yeah, I know. It's a stretch.

I was more thinking of the foreign government's citizens replicating their own currency. What's to stop them from doing that? "Laws against it" really isn't sufficient since there are laws against counterfeiting, too, and it happens. That devalues currency and it isn't even real money.

I don't know if they ever said you can't replicate latinum, but it sure makes sense. I think that's why gold is worthless, because it can be replicated (and why the Ferengi of Enterprise's "Acquisition" wanted gold - replicator tech wasn't common enough yet).

Here's the economic model that I think has to work: the Federation is like your family. Money comes in to the family because of the work someone does, the family spends money for the needs of its individual members. Among the family, money is not exchanged, and everybody does their part just because they are asked to. Family members can buy what they want, but they don't exceed the financial reaches of the family.

The Federation is like a really big family. Spending is controlled simply because Federation citizens don't spend a lot of money, and live within the Federation's means. I don't know how they can control that, but it's not such a reach once you've accepted the idea that people in a society will work without getting paid.

To carry it further, there may be certain things the Federation will not provide, but doesn't prohibit, hence you get civilian freighters and such who work for pay in order to purchase goods from outside the Federation economy, but as members of the Federation also have access to the "moneyless" economic benefits of the Federation.

I know nothing about economics, but I guess extending the family analogy would be, the Federation provides an allowance at a decent quality of life level, but the "kids" can always get jobs that provide them with their own income separate from the family they can spend as they wish.

The Sisko restaurant on Earth- does Joseph make the food for free? Does his staff work for free? I mean, he's a Federation citizen serving mainly Federation citizens (I assume).

That family metaphor doesn't work for me. A family still uses the same money that the outside economy uses, whether particular members of the family see that money or not. The Federation does not use money internally according to everything we've been told post-TOS, and without their own money, I don't see how they can use it externally. They have nothing to base a rate of currency exchange on if they have no currency of their own.

And that's why I can't accept the idea. I know that's Star Trek canon, but it's just not a workable, viable economic model. Internally, yes. Externally? No way.

Because it provides a necessity, it may be a little of both. The Federation may be willing to "cover the tab" for its citizens, but if the citizen wishes to pay in currency, or a foreign national were to dine, Joseph probably would be equipped to handle such a transaction. In any event, "tips" may be involved, and likely that would be handled by hard currency.

In which case, the Federation and its citizens aren't actually moneyless.

Well, the tips would be covered by gold pressed latinum or some such, which seems to be universal, and thus could be the domain of individuals, not the Federation. The Federation will compensate Joseph for the value of the meal (providing raw material, free equipment maintenance, etc.), but a tip comes from the individual, who may be a member of a moneyless Federation but through personal activities (selling old comic books or running medical cargo from the assend of space and back) has a supply of latinum of their own.

I don't know. The whole thing is bullshit.

Exactly. Hee.

Amen Brother Fjord!! Preach it on the mountains! Testify!!

Bullshit indeed. I'm sure an economist with too much time on his/her hands will figure it out.

But even if you have an "allowance", then you have money. If you tell the crew of DS9 that they can only spend X dollars at Quark's this month, then you have a society with money and you've broken the rule.

It really does fall apart if you try to look too closely.

I didn't mean an actual credit limit like allowance, just that people are allowed to "requisition" certain necessities of life to maintain the quality of life that seems fairly standard throughout the Federation. You want to move the family to Rigel 47? Great, we have an apartment all ready for you, and someone lined up to take the one you're vacating. All furnished of course, to your taste within reason.

Like I said, bullshit, but this is the closest I can get where it makes any kind of sense in my head. Otherwise the dichotomy of what the Federation says and what the Federation does would make the fanboy part of my brain implode.

That still doesn't explain how you would allocate scarce or one-of-a-kind items. Like antiques or artifacts or works of art or baseball cards. And if there's no money, do those things even have a value other than emotional value?

Well there's just no fanwanking that. Unless we say that the advent of replicator technology completely devalued all works of art in terms of monetary value because they could now be perfectly reproduced. I wonder if that includes down to the apparent age in terms of carbon dating? Of course, the "quantum date" would probably...

Ah, fuck it.

The first time we see Dr. Crusher she tells the guy with the fabrics that he can charge it to her account on the Enterprise. I'm all for a no money society as long as someone can make the details make sense. I got the impression from DS9 that the gold press latnium was the standard currency of the Alpha Quadrant. Does anyone remember what the ppl in the Gamma Quadrant use? I remember an ep when Quark is on the Defaint and he's there to a make deal with some guy. I see nothing wrong with a society that has a base line for the standard of living for it's citizens. If you want more than the basics you go an aquire some money to pay for extras but if the main philosophy of humans is to better themselves than you really don't need money to achive that end though I've always been unclear about. So it's the whole the Federation that has no money? How did they get the 100 some odd member worlds to along with it. Sisko always talked about Earth as paradise not the Federation itself. Doesn't Sisko say in S6 or S7 that he wants to buy a house on Bajor? One thing I never liked about the no money future is that humans are great business people. Yes, there are Enrons and others but there are a lot of good and honest business people around. I can't believe they never had Quark read Milton Friedman or Adam Smith and make some comment about it. I remember an ep when Nog is talking to Miles about the great river of money or something and a lot of what he was saying was similar to what die hard free marketers say with the same religious fervor.

Indeed! I'm a "die hard free marketer," and I found myself making the "great material continuum" argument when discussing NAFTA last week. Seriously.

To a certain extent, this parallels discussions we have here, right now, about free trade, globalization, and the like. It's not relly possible to shut yourself off from the world- maybe it was in centuries past, but not now.

So one can argue that Federation citizens have a different mindset. Maybe people aren't as adventurous so as to want to move to Rigel. Maybe they don't mind a lack of freedom that not having your own money brings. Maybe most people are born, live, and die on the same planet, so they never come into contact with non-Federation types. But it's still impossible to lock out. You may have your little restaurant in New Orleans, but your son is a non-Federation space station commander and you may want to visit him. Or he visits you. And someone will have money to spend. Or there are non-UFP ambassadors (although see below). Or dilithium crystals to buy.

What irks me is that the introduction of "canon" means they seem to edit scripts more closely than they did in TOS. Back then (and in many novels, including my favorite, How Much for Just the Planet, which is all about money), characters were allowed to speak in our language all the time. OK, it was "credits," but one of Roger Ebert's rules is that every sci-fi movie will feature "credits."

But now they seem to watch themselves. It's canon that baseball doesn't exist, so we have to be on the guard for baseball metaphors. And this is much bigger when it comes to money.

The place where this irks the most is ENT, supposedly a prequel. The characters on ENT seem to speak much more formally than those on TOS. In four years, we never heard one mention of money. No one ever said, "That what we get paid for" or "How much did it cost" or "The Vulcans are taking our taxes" or anything. Not even the Klingons or Romulans (of all people) seem to have money.

So, in short, I agree with Harrison.

The only way it works is if (1) human nature has changed such that people work for "personal betterment" without the incentive created by money; (2) human nature has changed so that people don't mind being told they can't have their own runabout or an original piece of art; and (3) there's some resource-allocation system that works without money. Like I said, I'm willing to believe that the Feds have made some great advances in economics/human nature - it goes nicely with the warp speed and time travel.

The comic Miracleman had a nice run on this theme. In the original series, Miracleman (a superman clone twice removed) and his super-pals finally give up on their secret identity and take over the Earth. After disposing of the world's weapons and various other details, Miracleman announces that he is reorganizing society, and all money is hereby worthless. The original author shows pictures of the homeless dancing in the streets and plutocrats crying, and then never discusses that issue again.

The next author has a cute sequence where he shows the barter economies that are growing in the shadow of the new regime. An artist opens a booth with t-shirts she has created, and gives them to anyone who asks, but then the person who gets them says something like "Umm, thank you for this gift. Please accept this gift from me" and gives the artist something else.

I loved How Much for Just the Planet.

Damn. I would have paid gold pressed latinum to witness that, nelamm. Especially since I got involved in a CAFTA argument myself a few days ago.



Didn't Malcom bet somebody a month's pay that Quantum would be back on the bridge of a starship at the end of TATV? (No, I don't know why I bother to remember anything from that episode, either.)

Whoa! If so, there goes my argument.

"Just because jobs are going overseas, it doesn't mean we lose jobs. You see, the Ferengi have this belief..."

"The Ferengi?"

"Yeah, this species on Star Trek. Their religion is capitalism. After you die, you're judged on how much money you earned."

"And you're bringing proof from this?"

Come over to the dark side, guys. It's much more comfortable over here where Trek canon about money is ignored.

1 and 2 I can suspend my disbelief for and go with, it's number 3 that I can't. It just doesn't work when you scrutinize it, as we've been doing.

Which will only work in a vacuum when human society has no other (money using) societies to interact with. The Federation does not exist in such a vacuum. It has Romulans, Klingons, Ferengi, and many others to interact with. (The example also illustrates what I've thought for a while: that world peace can only be achieved under a dictator.)

Hah, nelamm! Well, at least the person you were discussing this with didn't know about Ferengi attitudes toward women. That would have really made using them as a source difficult.

Gilmel, any room for me over there? My econ professors brainwashed me too well, and trying to make sense of this makes my brain hurt.

Sure! Plenty of room! The more the merrier and all. I think I got Cleo over here yesterday, too, per this comment:

Hee, thanks.

Re: Money on ENT, I forgot to quote the following from the last recap:

I long gave up trying to make sense of the money thing in Enterprise.

The best I can fanwank is that they're lying to themselves. They may not have physical coins or bills that they use among themselves, instead embracing the apparently in their minds more civilised notion of a pure credit system, but the Federation itself has money, and a traveller from the federation with suffucient credit can always transfer some of it into latinum for dealing with outsiders. The reason we always hear Federation citizens claiming they don't use money is that they consider reliance on physical exchange of actual currency to be primitive. The "Oh, WE don't use money; we're beyond such things!" is no more unusual a case of doublethink than many things I hear contemporary Americans say every day. Why do we always assume that no one in the future has their head as far up their ass as people today do?

I just can't believe that when they say they don't have money, they mean they don't carry physical money, and it's all done through bank accounts and thumb-print transactions. It just seems like such a cheat for the characters to say that.

Although the posts are gone now, we did once hyper-analyze the discussion that this thread's title comes from, between Picard and Lily in First Contact. She says, "You mean you don't get paid?" and he launches into a whole "the economics of the future are different blah blah blah cashcakes" speech. If he does get paid and it all gets direct deposited to his bank account, then that's one hell of a non-sequitor.
No, I still think canon requires us to accept that there's not even money for distributing resources, even resources like fine art and antiques and such.

I think the bottom line for me is this: If any of us could understand how a society without money could be made to work, and we could communicate that to the world clearly, then we should be winning the Nobel Peace Prize for solving poverty. We aren't, so we can't comprehend it, and maybe it's a mistake to try.

Well, fine. You're not invited to our Dark Side party. Really, though, no-more-money and no-more-human-religion are the two points of the Trekverse that I just have never been able to reconcile with believability (suspended or not) or my vision of a utopian future. No more poverty, sure. No more money at all just doesn't fly with me.

That so much echoes the catechism I was taught on understanding the Trinity, it's not even funny. There comes a point in trying to comprehend Star Trek canon that we can't reason any longer, so we have to accept it on faith, then? Maybe that's why they chose that crappy song for the ENT theme.

I can't even bear to think about all this too deeply, I get so confused. Every time I hear Picard spout the "working for personal betterment" stuff I think how great it sounds, and then I try and figure out how that actually would work, and I eventually end up at
I have finally decided to take it on trust that money no longer exists, and move on to nitpicking stuff that doesn't make my brain bleed!

I think it's sort of like accepting that the Roman gods exist for the purpose of understanding The Aeneid or The Metamorphoses. You just have to accept that within the context of the story, they exist, or the story doesn't quite work.

There are those who claim that the Romans and Greeks actually living the stories believed it too, but that's another story.

One thing that really troubles me about this entire point- and, in fact, many others in the Trek universe- is what it says about society as a whole. By saying "humans have moved beyond X," you're treating humanity as a collective. But what if one person doesn't want to give up his money? What if one person wants to have a bit more than other people, or live nicer, or earn more? Or what if one person doesn't want to give up some parochial idea- religion, nationality, etc.? I find it very hard to reconcile an absence of money with true liberty. And humans, or a significant number of them, will always try to be free- it's been that way since earliest time, and I don't see how it will change in a few centuries, no matter what happens. (And blaming all on disasters of the next hundred years make Trek a dystopia, not a utopia.)

What makes this really scary is the way that prisons, in Star Trek, are portrayed as "rehabilitation colonies" or literal psychiatric hospitals. It certainly seems as if there are "correct" ways of thinking that dissidents must be re-educated into. And once you allow for that, I don't see how you can stop when someone insists on owning personal property, or being a Zoroastrian, or a citizen of Nebraska (just to give examples). This begins to smack of Mao and Stalin, and it's not a world I'd want to live in. Eddington, of course, made much the same point, and much better than I.

However, many of these issues can be solved easily: Yes, people earn salaries! Yes, people do sometimes not get along with each other! Prisons are for people who commit actual crimes!

Anyway, that's my rant. From a more meta perspective, I think the issue arose as follows: When Kirk says, in 1986, "They're still using money," he means, "Still using cash." Granted, it's a bit awkward, but Nicholas Meyer wrote the script, and he's the one who put a No Smoking sign on the bridge, gave Kirk glasses, and put pots in the mess hall. I don't think he'd shy away from money. The problem is, the concept of "canon" was established not long after. Whoever's in charge of it- the Okudas?- seem to have seized upon this line and set "no money" into stone. In all fairness, they may have thought it reflected some '60's utopian idea of Roddenberry, although he himself had money in TOS and Encounter at Farpoint (as mentioned above), both his projects. In any event, the concept was then made more explicit in First Contact and DS9, and we're left to wonder and, in my case at least, worry about it.

I'd love to have the job of the person who sets canon, by the way.

Wouldn't that make you the pope? :)

More to the point, actual Romans in actual Roman culture creating and writing the story of The Aeneid actually believed in those gods, even though we don't. So the comparison to Trek canon doesn't work because 20th Century American culture, out of which Trek and its canon came, doesn't believe in the absence of money in the future. Even us few Trekkies here can't agree on its believability, and if anyone should buy into it, it should be Trekkies.

I agree. I would see the disappearance of money after an apocalyptic event believable on Battlestar Galactica, which is true destruction of their entire way of life, unlike yet another world war for humans to survive in the Trek future. But BSG is dealing with dystopia, not utopia.

Exactly. If the government controls your access to everything, like your ability to get a runabout to move to a different planet with a furnished apartment, because you don't have or aren't allowed to have money, that's goverment control of your movement and living space and existance. That's not freedom. It's Brave New World. Chilling.

If we want to agree that it's impossible to have a moneyless future, but still will set aside that understanding for the sake of Trek, I can get on board with that. I just can't accept the explanations for why a moneyless future would work, because they don't stand up to close scrutiny.

I don't think we can explain why a moneyless future would work. I don't think it would, especially when you consider the transition. I'm trying to explain how a moneyless future could work. I think those are separate questions.

Well, the "how" explanations don't work for me, either, when the non-Federation societies that the Federation interacts with are taken into account.

Fair enough. I haven't really come up with a theory that satisfies me, either.

I'd just rather accept the answer that their society does, somehow, magically work without money than the answer that they have money and the characters have been misleading us all this time.