As I explained in one of my most widely read articles, Star Trek’s Federation (or at least Earth) is definitely socialist by the time of the New Generation series, and probably the time of the original series that focused on the Enterprise commanded by Captain Kirk. By “socialist,” I mean an economy where all large enterprises are controlled by the government, not merely a market economy where there is regulation or a welfare state. Despite Republican rhetoric to the contrary, Barack Obama is not a socialist; but he would be one if he sought to nationalize all major enterprises and abolish the use of money, as Star Trek’s Federation seems to have done.
By the time of the original series, the Federation already lacks any currency (which is necessary to run a large-scale market economy), and all large enterprises seem to be government-owned;
This is manifestly incorrect. There were several mining colonies in the original series, including entreprenures in the first Harry Mudd related episode where the women were basically being sold to the miners. Then there was the one with the Horta’s which was another private company that was doing mining on another planet.
There were privately owned freighters in the original series as well as in the next generation and in Deep Space Nine.
A question should be asked though and it is different than what you might think….
If a society is so rich that there is no poverty, is it socialism to have government healthcare? If there is so much money that basically you are born as a millionaire no matter your circumstances, do the rulebooks that we live by still apply? This is what will be the inevitable result of the scale of civilization implied by the Federation. This is what Picard talked about in the Movie “First Contact” when he was talking to Zefram Cochran about what warp drive meant to humanity.
The thing I never understood about this alleged moneyless economy is, how did they keep billions of people from falling into the trap of indolence and dependency that we have seen happen in our much less socialized economy in the here and now?
I don’t think humanity could survive recognizably in such circumstances. We’re not bees or ants capable of functioning that way and keeping our sanity as individuals. We need challenge on a level the Federation as depicted never offered — unless you moved a thousand light-years from Earth, but most did not and would not.
Of course, the “moneyless” business and all that stuff was never seriously developed in anything I ever saw or read; in the end it’s such a surreal concept that it violates the fundamental storytelling rule of “show, don’t tell.” If they didn’t tell us the Federation had no currency, we’d never know it. And one would think that would be a pretty significant part of the world the characters live in. They couldn’t show because they didn’t even know how to tell it beyond merely stating it as a Federation Fun Fact™.
If society is so rich there’s no poverty, why would you need or even want government healthcare? Why would any one need any government handout / welfare / support if there’s no poverty?
But the very question misunderstands free markets, which are not about wealth, but about liberty. If you can’t own anything, you can’t be free because everything you do involves things controlled by other people.
McGehee;
The thing I never understood about this alleged moneyless economy is, how did they keep billions of people from falling into the trap of indolence and dependency that we have seen happen in our much less socialized economy in the here and now?
How do you know they don’t? Perhaps Star Fleet are the only people who haven’t and everyone else in the Federation are just indolent drones.
The Federation seems to have limitless supplies of energy (dilithium crystals, anti-matter) to power not only trans light-speed starships and transporter beams but also replicators, not only the source of odd looking food but presumably what Mr. Scott uses to fabricate repair parts. WW-II vintage ships and subs carried machine tools to effect repairs of battle damage, and starships carry what is presumably industrial tech of the day: replicators.
And no, the Federation is not tapping those vast quantities of energy with solar panels and wind turbines. No siree, all of that energy has to be coming from some kind of nuclear effect.
If the current world economy can get past its actual or perceived or perhaps self-imposed scarcity of energy, waste products are not a problem, environmental polution is not a problem, scarcity of copper is not a problem, the trillions in debt are not a problem because it is funny money anyway. If we limit ourselves to renewables, that is a huge problem.
Was not the point in a few of the original episodes the scarcity of and competition for the dilithium resources? An example would be the one where Kirk is smitten by the woman because her tears are some kind of aphrodisiac. Turns out her planet is so full of dilithium that she wears it as a necklace, astounding Spock & Scotty. The Klingons want her planet for their own, so they have a spy plant a bomb that ends up wrecking the Enterprise’s crystals and leads to all sorts of phaser play. The “limits” of energy resources was a plot point. But the notion that the a space-faring society would require extremely densely rich energy sources is correct.
Why would anyone choose to be a redshirt if there is no scarcity or payment for services?
I suggest any of Iain M Banks Culture novels for how a post scarcity society can work and why.
You’re falling into a common trap of not thinking about what Economic systems actually do.
Deep Space Nine is called out in the article as being free of the “no money” restriction because they’re not in the Federation. And I looked up Harvey Mudd and he hardly looks like an “entrepreneur”.
I don’t watch Star Trek because of exactly this. It always struck me as the propaganda films of a totalitarian socialist dictatorship to cover up the war crimes committed against the peace-loving Klingon democracy.
There is no such thing as a society that’s too wealthy for poverty. Wealth must not only exist, but be distributed. It can’t just be held, but produced. An economy isn’t the wealth that exists, but the process that replaces and sustains it.
Currency isn’t itself wealth; it’s really a form of communication that enables the distribution and creation of wealth. So, to suggest that because wealth currently exists it must be given away to this or that person, it tears down that process in favor of the results of yesterday’s operations. It’s just not possible that any amount of wealth can change that.
There’s also always scarcity. Even if there’s infinite physical wealth, there’s “mindshare”, there’s novelty, there’s community. There will always be scarcity. Even if you have an infinite amount of pharmaceuticals, you would have a finite number of doctors. If you have an infinite number of AI doctors, you have a limited number of operating rooms. And wherever you have scarcity, you need to replace the scarce resource when it wears out and produce more than you have.
And I looked up Harvey Mudd and he hardly looks like an “entrepreneur”.
Harvey Mudd was a mining engineer who founded the Cyprus Mines Corporation (as well as Harvey Mudd College). I think that qualifies him as an entrepreneur.
However, you really should look up “Harry Mudd” instead. Also Cyrano Jones, Carter Winston, etc.
Dr. McCoy once mentioned Winston using his personal fortune to save an entire planet (including McCoy’s daughter) from a famine. Which implies that he, as a private citizen, was able to do something Star Fleet couldn’t. (I’m sure Mark Whittington would be mortified by a heresy like that. 🙂
Big D asks: Why would anyone choose to be a redshirt if there is no scarcity or payment for services?
Watch any US Marines recruitment video and note that lack of references to payment for services or scarcity reduction.
The Few, The Brave, The Proud: The Redshirts.
Oh, you’re right. I looked up Harry Mudd, and the article said it may be a reference to Harvey Mudd, and I misremembered the article that I’d just looked up.
Harry Mudd,
Harcourt Fenton Mudd was his full name. (yes I know, a Star Trek Geek from waaaay back.)
Which implies that he, as a private citizen, was able to do something Star Fleet couldn’t.
Maybe he was just in the neighborhood and tossed out a few billion for a tax write off.
Not being a trekkie/trekker, (I watched the first series pretty avidly but didn’t study it), maybe the answer to the whole money free thing is just that one of the writers put in an ill-thought out bit of wish fulfillment and the rest of the writers were stuck with it.
Another thought is that electronic money was barely a gleam in some banker’s eye at the time, and the moneyless thing was a prediction based on the development of credit/debit cards.
Whatever. The whole argument about whether it was a piece of socialist propaganda or not is moot, since I’m sure I was the same as 90% of kids who watched the shows. Whenever a particularly heavy peice of preaching came on, I was yelling “Get on with the action!” and when they began to get counsellors involved, that was that for me.
Perhaps Star Fleet are the only people who haven’t and everyone else in the Federation are just indolent drones.
The franchise did show plenty of people who were not in Starfleet, and very few drones (except the Borg, of course).
Also, Daveon (on what?), there is simply no such thing as a “post-scarcity” economy because certain things of value are never going to be infinite. If the scarcity of real estate is addressed by space travel, infinite energy can address that — but then you have the scarcity of time to spend traveling to your new infinite real estate. Within the range you can travel in your lifespan, there are a finite number of habitable planets, no matter how you define “habitable.”
Putting billions of people on sleeper ships to lie in suspended animation for thousands of years until they reach the next galaxy over, may be a solution to the scarcity of time, but then you run into the scarcity of people willing to trust that the machines will defrost them when the dinger goes off. As far as I’m concerned, people that gullible are Darwin bait anyway.
McGhee, just because you can’t image it, doesn’t make it impossible.
Just ask Venor Vinge on the topic.
I once heard Harry Harrison and Joe Haldeman, both SF greats, that they didn’t think nano-technology was really possible because it was virtually impossible for them to write decent SF in a universe where it worked properly and pretty much ended what should have been an interesting panel discussion there and then.
Even assuming there will always been something that will be scare; energy, computational availability (Charlie Stross does this nicely in Accelerando) – things that are currently rationed due to scarcity might not need to be: healthcare, food, heat/light/accommodation.
Realistically we don’t even need to colonize space. PJ O’Rourke nicely skewers arguments about over population in one of his books.
So everybody lives in a villa and California population densities, with free energy, healthcare, food, heat, light and computational access. People live a long time so the population is fairly stable over periods.
Iain Banks, and another commentator have handled the indolent argument. Some might well become so, but there will probably be enough people to volunteer to do things differently to keep people going.
At some point though. You’ll still hit the singularity.
Banks isn’t that much more consistent than Star Trek. For instance, in Matter the Special Circumstances agent can’t command transportation to where she wants to go, she has to depend on various transfers along a (for her) inefficient route. So clearly there’s not enough wealth for people to have their own starships.
On the other hand, Consider Phlebas notes that The Culture doesn’t use money because they consider it “an inefficient form of rationing” which certainly implies rationing, despite claims in the same chapter that there is no scarcity.
For working post-scarcity civilizations, I think John C. Wright got closer in the Golden Phoenix trilogy. However, note that both that society and The Culture require oversight by transendant machine intelligences in order to function.
insanely cheap energy and replicators providing essentially all material needs leaves people to focus on the top levels of the maslow hierarchy of needs.
Star Fleet is quite rich in scientists, engineers, all interested in exploration for it’s own sake.
Wikipedia, Linux and Crowd-sourcing is a future model for the Federation.
Also increased material success and education tends to reduce birth rates. Most G-8 countries are in Negative Population Growth.
insanely cheap energy and replicators providing essentially all material needs leaves people to focus on the top levels of the maslow hierarchy of needs.
Maslow…head hurts….read when I was twelve, cognative vs conative…. ouch.
I do agree though.
There are some items that cannot be replicated (latinum and yamok sauce are examples cited here, so there is some scarcity.
Article 17 of the Articles of Federation (source: Star Fleet Technical Manual, 1975) grants budgetary power to the Supreme Assembly and establishes the Federation’s currency. At some point between Kirk’s TV exploits and Star Trek IV the Feds evidently amended this article, as the Feds had abolished currency by then.
But in Wrath of Khan, Dr. Carol Marcus that food scarcity is still a phenomenon of her time (one reason she offers for furthering Genesis Project research). How did food distribution exist without currency? Even the Village of the “Prisoner” TV show had a form of currency, in the form of ration cards.
Truth is, Star Trek was given to us by utopian hippies who didn’t think their pipe dreams through. I wonder if Roddenberry read Looking Backward a few too many times…
A side note: the Articles of Federation is heavily cribbed from the UN Charter.
Star Trek was an amazing movie! My friends and I have been lovers since we were adoloscents. I loved how the characters created their friendship. The choice of young actors was perfect
As I explained in one of my most widely read articles, Star Trek’s Federation (or at least Earth) is definitely socialist by the time of the New Generation series, and probably the time of the original series that focused on the Enterprise commanded by Captain Kirk. By “socialist,” I mean an economy where all large enterprises are controlled by the government, not merely a market economy where there is regulation or a welfare state. Despite Republican rhetoric to the contrary, Barack Obama is not a socialist; but he would be one if he sought to nationalize all major enterprises and abolish the use of money, as Star Trek’s Federation seems to have done.
By the time of the original series, the Federation already lacks any currency (which is necessary to run a large-scale market economy), and all large enterprises seem to be government-owned;
This is manifestly incorrect. There were several mining colonies in the original series, including entreprenures in the first Harry Mudd related episode where the women were basically being sold to the miners. Then there was the one with the Horta’s which was another private company that was doing mining on another planet.
There were privately owned freighters in the original series as well as in the next generation and in Deep Space Nine.
A question should be asked though and it is different than what you might think….
If a society is so rich that there is no poverty, is it socialism to have government healthcare? If there is so much money that basically you are born as a millionaire no matter your circumstances, do the rulebooks that we live by still apply? This is what will be the inevitable result of the scale of civilization implied by the Federation. This is what Picard talked about in the Movie “First Contact” when he was talking to Zefram Cochran about what warp drive meant to humanity.
The thing I never understood about this alleged moneyless economy is, how did they keep billions of people from falling into the trap of indolence and dependency that we have seen happen in our much less socialized economy in the here and now?
I don’t think humanity could survive recognizably in such circumstances. We’re not bees or ants capable of functioning that way and keeping our sanity as individuals. We need challenge on a level the Federation as depicted never offered — unless you moved a thousand light-years from Earth, but most did not and would not.
Of course, the “moneyless” business and all that stuff was never seriously developed in anything I ever saw or read; in the end it’s such a surreal concept that it violates the fundamental storytelling rule of “show, don’t tell.” If they didn’t tell us the Federation had no currency, we’d never know it. And one would think that would be a pretty significant part of the world the characters live in. They couldn’t show because they didn’t even know how to tell it beyond merely stating it as a Federation Fun Fact™.
If society is so rich there’s no poverty, why would you need or even want government healthcare? Why would any one need any government handout / welfare / support if there’s no poverty?
But the very question misunderstands free markets, which are not about wealth, but about liberty. If you can’t own anything, you can’t be free because everything you do involves things controlled by other people.
McGehee;
How do you know they don’t? Perhaps Star Fleet are the only people who haven’t and everyone else in the Federation are just indolent drones.
The Federation seems to have limitless supplies of energy (dilithium crystals, anti-matter) to power not only trans light-speed starships and transporter beams but also replicators, not only the source of odd looking food but presumably what Mr. Scott uses to fabricate repair parts. WW-II vintage ships and subs carried machine tools to effect repairs of battle damage, and starships carry what is presumably industrial tech of the day: replicators.
And no, the Federation is not tapping those vast quantities of energy with solar panels and wind turbines. No siree, all of that energy has to be coming from some kind of nuclear effect.
If the current world economy can get past its actual or perceived or perhaps self-imposed scarcity of energy, waste products are not a problem, environmental polution is not a problem, scarcity of copper is not a problem, the trillions in debt are not a problem because it is funny money anyway. If we limit ourselves to renewables, that is a huge problem.
Was not the point in a few of the original episodes the scarcity of and competition for the dilithium resources? An example would be the one where Kirk is smitten by the woman because her tears are some kind of aphrodisiac. Turns out her planet is so full of dilithium that she wears it as a necklace, astounding Spock & Scotty. The Klingons want her planet for their own, so they have a spy plant a bomb that ends up wrecking the Enterprise’s crystals and leads to all sorts of phaser play. The “limits” of energy resources was a plot point. But the notion that the a space-faring society would require extremely densely rich energy sources is correct.
Why would anyone choose to be a redshirt if there is no scarcity or payment for services?
I suggest any of Iain M Banks Culture novels for how a post scarcity society can work and why.
You’re falling into a common trap of not thinking about what Economic systems actually do.
Deep Space Nine is called out in the article as being free of the “no money” restriction because they’re not in the Federation. And I looked up Harvey Mudd and he hardly looks like an “entrepreneur”.
I don’t watch Star Trek because of exactly this. It always struck me as the propaganda films of a totalitarian socialist dictatorship to cover up the war crimes committed against the peace-loving Klingon democracy.
There is no such thing as a society that’s too wealthy for poverty. Wealth must not only exist, but be distributed. It can’t just be held, but produced. An economy isn’t the wealth that exists, but the process that replaces and sustains it.
Currency isn’t itself wealth; it’s really a form of communication that enables the distribution and creation of wealth. So, to suggest that because wealth currently exists it must be given away to this or that person, it tears down that process in favor of the results of yesterday’s operations. It’s just not possible that any amount of wealth can change that.
There’s also always scarcity. Even if there’s infinite physical wealth, there’s “mindshare”, there’s novelty, there’s community. There will always be scarcity. Even if you have an infinite amount of pharmaceuticals, you would have a finite number of doctors. If you have an infinite number of AI doctors, you have a limited number of operating rooms. And wherever you have scarcity, you need to replace the scarce resource when it wears out and produce more than you have.
And I looked up Harvey Mudd and he hardly looks like an “entrepreneur”.
Harvey Mudd was a mining engineer who founded the Cyprus Mines Corporation (as well as Harvey Mudd College). I think that qualifies him as an entrepreneur.
However, you really should look up “Harry Mudd” instead. Also Cyrano Jones, Carter Winston, etc.
Dr. McCoy once mentioned Winston using his personal fortune to save an entire planet (including McCoy’s daughter) from a famine. Which implies that he, as a private citizen, was able to do something Star Fleet couldn’t. (I’m sure Mark Whittington would be mortified by a heresy like that. 🙂
Big D asks: Why would anyone choose to be a redshirt if there is no scarcity or payment for services?
Watch any US Marines recruitment video and note that lack of references to payment for services or scarcity reduction.
The Few, The Brave, The Proud: The Redshirts.
Oh, you’re right. I looked up Harry Mudd, and the article said it may be a reference to Harvey Mudd, and I misremembered the article that I’d just looked up.
Harry Mudd,
Harcourt Fenton Mudd was his full name. (yes I know, a Star Trek Geek from waaaay back.)
Which implies that he, as a private citizen, was able to do something Star Fleet couldn’t.
Maybe he was just in the neighborhood and tossed out a few billion for a tax write off.
Not being a trekkie/trekker, (I watched the first series pretty avidly but didn’t study it), maybe the answer to the whole money free thing is just that one of the writers put in an ill-thought out bit of wish fulfillment and the rest of the writers were stuck with it.
Another thought is that electronic money was barely a gleam in some banker’s eye at the time, and the moneyless thing was a prediction based on the development of credit/debit cards.
Whatever. The whole argument about whether it was a piece of socialist propaganda or not is moot, since I’m sure I was the same as 90% of kids who watched the shows. Whenever a particularly heavy peice of preaching came on, I was yelling “Get on with the action!” and when they began to get counsellors involved, that was that for me.
The franchise did show plenty of people who were not in Starfleet, and very few drones (except the Borg, of course).
Also, Daveon (on what?), there is simply no such thing as a “post-scarcity” economy because certain things of value are never going to be infinite. If the scarcity of real estate is addressed by space travel, infinite energy can address that — but then you have the scarcity of time to spend traveling to your new infinite real estate. Within the range you can travel in your lifespan, there are a finite number of habitable planets, no matter how you define “habitable.”
Putting billions of people on sleeper ships to lie in suspended animation for thousands of years until they reach the next galaxy over, may be a solution to the scarcity of time, but then you run into the scarcity of people willing to trust that the machines will defrost them when the dinger goes off. As far as I’m concerned, people that gullible are Darwin bait anyway.
McGhee, just because you can’t image it, doesn’t make it impossible.
Just ask Venor Vinge on the topic.
I once heard Harry Harrison and Joe Haldeman, both SF greats, that they didn’t think nano-technology was really possible because it was virtually impossible for them to write decent SF in a universe where it worked properly and pretty much ended what should have been an interesting panel discussion there and then.
Even assuming there will always been something that will be scare; energy, computational availability (Charlie Stross does this nicely in Accelerando) – things that are currently rationed due to scarcity might not need to be: healthcare, food, heat/light/accommodation.
Realistically we don’t even need to colonize space. PJ O’Rourke nicely skewers arguments about over population in one of his books.
So everybody lives in a villa and California population densities, with free energy, healthcare, food, heat, light and computational access. People live a long time so the population is fairly stable over periods.
Iain Banks, and another commentator have handled the indolent argument. Some might well become so, but there will probably be enough people to volunteer to do things differently to keep people going.
At some point though. You’ll still hit the singularity.
Banks isn’t that much more consistent than Star Trek. For instance, in Matter the Special Circumstances agent can’t command transportation to where she wants to go, she has to depend on various transfers along a (for her) inefficient route. So clearly there’s not enough wealth for people to have their own starships.
On the other hand, Consider Phlebas notes that The Culture doesn’t use money because they consider it “an inefficient form of rationing” which certainly implies rationing, despite claims in the same chapter that there is no scarcity.
For working post-scarcity civilizations, I think John C. Wright got closer in the Golden Phoenix trilogy. However, note that both that society and The Culture require oversight by transendant machine intelligences in order to function.
insanely cheap energy and replicators providing essentially all material needs leaves people to focus on the top levels of the maslow hierarchy of needs.
Star Fleet is quite rich in scientists, engineers, all interested in exploration for it’s own sake.
Wikipedia, Linux and Crowd-sourcing is a future model for the Federation.
Also increased material success and education tends to reduce birth rates. Most G-8 countries are in Negative Population Growth.
insanely cheap energy and replicators providing essentially all material needs leaves people to focus on the top levels of the maslow hierarchy of needs.
Maslow…head hurts….read when I was twelve, cognative vs conative…. ouch.
I do agree though.
There are some items that cannot be replicated (latinum and yamok sauce are examples cited here, so there is some scarcity.
Article 17 of the Articles of Federation (source: Star Fleet Technical Manual, 1975) grants budgetary power to the Supreme Assembly and establishes the Federation’s currency. At some point between Kirk’s TV exploits and Star Trek IV the Feds evidently amended this article, as the Feds had abolished currency by then.
But in Wrath of Khan, Dr. Carol Marcus that food scarcity is still a phenomenon of her time (one reason she offers for furthering Genesis Project research). How did food distribution exist without currency? Even the Village of the “Prisoner” TV show had a form of currency, in the form of ration cards.
Truth is, Star Trek was given to us by utopian hippies who didn’t think their pipe dreams through. I wonder if Roddenberry read Looking Backward a few too many times…
A side note: the Articles of Federation is heavily cribbed from the UN Charter.
Star Trek was an amazing movie! My friends and I have been lovers since we were adoloscents. I loved how the characters created their friendship. The choice of young actors was perfect