Atekimogus wrote:GrahamKennedy wrote:RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:They had money to buy stuff. Beverly bought that damned bolt of cloth in 'Encounter'. And for my proverbial money's worth, doesn't matter who it was to, just that she bought it. Or the drinks in Quark's on a Federation-run station.
But one TNG era human engaging in a monetary transaction with another? I don't know of a single example, myself.
What about the human weapons dealer who worked briefly with Quark? A point could be made that we don't actually see him trade with other humans, still....
Precisely. We don't ever see him dealing with other humans.
Or what about all those humans working with thr orion syndicate, for example the chap who is befriended by O'Brien? I'd imagine he doesn't engage in criminal activity to better himself and the rest of humanity.
But again, these are people who are like the Humans on DS9 - they've left the Federation and are operating in alien territory.
What about Riza? There is a whole planet who doesn't produce ANYTHING and relies exclusivly on toursim, however, if said tourism produces nothing you can use to aquire all the other essential stuff a planet needs to survive.....
Again, not a human planet.
The best way I can figure that the Trek system works is this - and this is entirely an after the fact rationalistation, not at all what I think the writers intended...
The "no money" thing of the future is a 24th century, human thing. And not even something that applies to every member of the human species as such, but an aspect of how Earth and some other human governed planets run themselves. Earth runs without the benefit of money, probably some sort of quasi-communistic society. Planets colonised by Earth are mostly run on the Earth model, though there's no reason a colony might not adopt some other model for government - Picard himself said that creating new ways of living is one of the reasons people colonise, after all.
Earth and the other "communist" human planets are net producers, and the government sells their surplus to the rest of the Federation or to alien cultures for money. This goes into a central pool. When a human needs some money to deal with aliens, he requests it from the government. So for example say Picard wants to visit Risa. He contacts the government, asks for some money for his holiday, it's given to him, and off he goes. But if Picard decided to go to Earth for his holiday there'd be no need, because there'd be nothing to pay for. He'd just go and hang out and do whatever.
There would need to be limits to what you could request of the government - you couldn't just say "I want a billion bars of GPL please, so I can live like a king on the Ferengi home world" because they'd just say "no, that's unreasonable."
You'd need a thousand little wrinkles to make all that practical... but then that's true of capitalism, too.
In short, imho (and really just mho) the idea of a society without anything resembling money in one way or another is incredibly stupid. A functioning monetary system is a cultural achievement and doing away with it is like saying, look at us, we are so advanced we don't need the alphabet (or something similar) anymore since we don't write stuff down anymore. (I vaguly remember learning about the early high cultures like egypt or babylonians etc. in school and what marks a cutlure as advanced. Having developed money and writing is on top of the list. It is there for a reason)
A functioning money system, like an alphabet, is not a thing of goodness in and of itself. It is there because it serves a purpose, and if the purpose becomes obsolete then yes, it would be discarded. I can easily imagine a future in which the alphabet - and writing as a whole - became an obsolete thing of the past.
What they SHOULD have done is not doing away with money, but SHOWING us that ressources are more effectivly and justly distributed, that they did away with poverty and all the misery that stems from it and that GREED isn't longer THE MOST strongest driving force of humanity like it is nowadays and that because of that, our society has matured greatly and is capable of better decisions. All that wouldn't make money obsolete.
My biggest issue with the no money thing is not how inconsistent they are with it, but rather that they clearly never thought it out or set out to give it any context or background.
TNG did this a lot... they would preach about how stupid the problems of today are, looking down their nose snottily at us primitives - but at the same time never giving any hint of the actual solutions they employ to solve these problems, or what the cultural landscape is that made them any different. A society without capitalism would have to be fundamentally different, and function with fundamentally different values, than ours. It would be great to see TNG explore just what those differences are... but they never bothered. They just depicted a society that's exactly the same as ours in virtually every respect, only people don't use money. They treat it as being as significant as whether people wear hats or not.
I've said it before... read the Culture books by Iain M. Banks. The Culture is a society that operates without money, and he goes into considerable detail about how it's possible and what the ramifications are. He points out that money is a form of
rationing, and as his characters put it, "money implies poverty". The Culture is able to operate without it because they have sources of material wealth and energy supply so vast that the means of productions "comprehensively outweigh the demand of even the most imaginative citizens". There's no money because nothing is worth anything, because there is no shortage of anything. A "post scarcity society".
He even depicted a situation in one book where a famous composer was going to give a live performance, and there was so much demand for actual "in the concert hall" seating (rather than attending through VR connections as most do) that the population began to trade favours to get tickets... and some enterprising souls even came up with IOUs containing lists of favours to help with the trading. Essentially reinventing money, because there was for once something that there was a shortage of. Which everyone involved thought was hilarious and all part of the fun of the concert.
Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a day. SET a man on fire, and you will keep him warm for the rest of his life...