by jerf | 2025-07-23 13:46:05+00:00
"I’m not sure how a society like that would ever work."

This is essentially why I stopped reading books that exist solely to push some economic philosophy or something. You can make anything work in fiction. Here, watch:

"On Dysokis, the fifth planet settled by Earth, everyone is happy and healthy and lives in perfect harmony all the time, working together to advance the common good."

That was easy to write. It's not particularly any harder to expand it out into a story. But it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean I have a path to that any more than anyone else does, or that if I do expand it out into a story, or a massive multi-decade shared franchise, that it has anything that can be practically obtained or emulated.

What "The Federation doesn't have money" really means is, we don't want stories about Geordi worrying about how he's going to pay his nephew's rent or Data arguing about whether or not he his patent for some $TECH is being violated and he's not getting paid out properly. We don't want stories about how some medical issue could be fixed but Ensign Bob can't afford to pay for it. We don't want stories about Commander Sally arguing about her pay raise. I know that's not what Roddenberry would have thought, but it's what it comes out to practically in the end in the shared universe.

And it works, and on the net despite its unreality I think it was a fantastic thing for the franchise. In the end, despite my disagreements with it being possible, the fact that I don't think Roddenberry meant it that way, and the fact that I don't even think Roddenberry was a particularly good guy, I think he backed into something that is a great deal of what made the Star Trek universe very special and why so many of us have enjoyed it so much. There's nothing wrong with the science fiction that explores societies that still have money and still have the resulting conflicts, but there's also nothing wrong with sometimes saying "Hey, that's not what this franchise is about" and using that as a way to explore into story spaces that the other franchises really can't, because money and conflict and such are forced by the logic of that particular franchise to wedge their way in and essentially dilute the rest of the story.

Would The Measure of a Man (can Data be dissembled and studied by Starfleet against his will?) been improved by adding a subplot about an argument about the size of the bond that should be posted before the trial? Would the Dominion War have been improved by an extensive plot about bribery causing substandard war ships to be created because someone at Utopia Planetia was just straight-up lining their pockets? There's nothing abstractly wrong with these ideas and they've been used in other series to good effect, but it's nice to have a series that spent no time on that particular aspect. And there'd be nothing wrong with some other franchise focusing almost exclusively on such a story.

But I don't think of the Federation "not having money" as anything other than a story device, and were I in charge of the franchise I would have written straight into the story bible that this is a framing device and authors are not to sit there and try to examine the details too closely, or try to write stories around how the idea doesn't really work. There's nothing to emulate there, there's no path from here to there, it just doesn't work. At least not with the model of human that I live with.