I know I am late to the discussion so forgive me if this has already been said, but I think what the writers were trying to say is that while humans still use some form of money to exchange goods and services, they no longer obsess over it as a means of accumulating stuff.
This is basically my take on it, although of course there would still be
some people who like to acquire stuff. If there weren't, the Ferengi wouldn't have found it quite so profitable to deal with "hew-mons." And speaking of Ferengi... if Harry Kim didn't have any money, why would Quark have tried to sell him some worthless trinket before Voyager departed to the Badlands? You can't tell me that Quark would have given something away without making some sort of profit. He wanted Harry's
money (which would presumably have been drawn from his Federation account, converted to gold-pressed latinum, and deposited in Quark's on-station account).
Wouldn't replicators require a great deal of resources?
To make a metal alloy for instance; it needs to draw those elements from somewhere. As I understand it, ships have huge stores and storage tanks for everything that they need to use the replicators for. And they use the warp core to power the enormous energy consumption that replicators use.
Exactly. Raw materials and energy aren't free. Where's it all coming from?
Yes.
It's not her top shelf stuff either.
Really. A pub owner gives her stuff away for free, including the non-synthetic drinks? Why would she do this - would it make her a more enlightened person?
I don't seem to recall Tom ever actually being "homeless" as such. A wandering sloppy drunk maybe, but hardly homeless, and certainly not malnourished.
So where did he live, then? It wasn't at his parents' home.
An attempt to imply some modicum of dignity to Kes' background. You're right, that's probably a little too generous; they really come off more like a couple of hitchhikers who got lost on their way to Kazon Burning Man.
Why is her background "undignified"? Granted, her relationship with Neelix always struck me as a bit creepy, given the relative differences in their ages. She seemed like a teenager at first, but gained a couple of decades (relatively speaking, as measured in human terms) by the time she left the ship. People living together is considered normal now in many parts of the world, so why would anyone on Voyager care if they weren't married?
Irrelevant, since none of them were BORN into Starfleet, and more importantly, aren't actually describing the conditions for Starfleet officers when they make those statements. Troi isn't telling Zephram Cochrane that poverty and disease and war are gone for Starfleet officers, she's describing the state of affairs on Earth in general.
Troi's father was Starfleet, wasn't he? The problem with all the pompous speeches these characters make, they're still talking about the parts of Earth they know about, which is basically Starfleet (and Picard's brother's winery).
Consider Jake's "I don't use money because I'm human" speech... if you're going to make the point that they don't use money on Earth, Jake's speech makes no sense whatsoever, unless he's claiming that humans live only on Earth or on starships/starbases. He's just got this cultural-blinders thing going on, like Picard, assuming that his little pocket of existence being one way means it's that way for everyone.
Any why doesn't anyone ever give me a satisfactory answer to this question: If humans don't use money, how did Beverly buy that cloth on Farpoint Station? She specifically said to charge it to her account on the Enterprise. So Beverly - who is human and from Earth - either uses money, or she committed fraud.
Huh... Tom Paris is basically NuKirk with a shittier lawyer.
Tom Paris grew up. NuKirk will never be anything other than Captain Frat Boy.
Which tells us the FEDERATION definitely uses money or at least some sort of electronic currency. Earth, evidently, does not.
Which is a whopping huge contradiction, since isn't the Federation Council located somewhere in Europe?
Which leads me to think that he also wouldn't allow replicated items produced off his property onto his property. So he isn't just going into town and buying replicated stuff and bringing it home.
If true, this implies there's an entire economy on Earth which doesn't involve the replicator.
This is true in RL, although you'd have to substitute electronic/online banking in place of replicators.
I know people who never carry cash for anything, since they prefer using credit and debit cards. Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum - people who absolutely don't trust electronic/online banking. My grandmother refused to activate her own debit card until the bank changed its procedures to the point where it was basically impossible to do anything
without an active card. Even if people never use it for transactions, they still have to have the card and PIN to access their account to make deposits and withdrawals. With me, it's a practical mix of all three, plus the barter system, depending on the situation.
How this would work on Earth as depicted in TNG, I'm not sure. Does Robert Picard pay for his supplies and groceries (the stuff he can grow himself) with bottles of wine? Unlikely, so there must be some other method of exchange.
But how much of Humanity would agree with Jean Luc's and Jake's description of what Humanity does and wants? Lean Luc/Jake could be describing a pocket culture within the greater Humanity multi-cultural civilization.
Starfleet, especially the portions of Starfleet that are based on Earth (and presumably the lunar colonies, Mars, and on Jupiter Station). Just ask the replicator for what you want, and POOF! there it is.
