Or "Rascals", when they beam the crew down to do manual labor or be killed. Hilarious.
I was thinking more of "Rascals," where they're defeated by a group of 12-year-olds.
DS9 gave the Ferengi more nuance, and a culture that went beyond "they force their females to wear clothes". Unfortunately, it promptly dismantled said culture, but at least it created it in the first place.
It did not dismantle Ferengi culture -- it depicted it as a complex society with competing factions and competing ideologies, where one of those ideologies started to gain traction and overcome the formerly-dominant ideology.
In "Profit and Lace", their institutionalized sexism ended, apparently overnight and with only brief repercussions (a woman fighting for equal rights in today's society can tell you... it doesn't work like that). And in "The Dogs of War", they went from a state of pure capitalism where everything is for sale and nothing's free to basically Federation 2.0!
It's certainly fair to argue that DS9 was not realistic in its depiction of cultural evolution, but that's not the same thing as dismantling Ferengi culture, and the new Ferenginar that Ishka, Zek, and Rom herald is
not Federation 2.0.
Zek's and Ishka's reforms are established to include:
- the levying of progressive income tax
- bribes as deductible from said taxes
- wage subsidies for the poor
- retirement benefits for the aged
- health care for the ill
- banning monopolies
- environmental regulations
- equal rights for women
- labor rights for workers
- including a ban on sexual harassment of employees by employers
- a legislature called the Congress of Economic Advisers
That's it. This is still a fundamentally capitalist society -- the economy is still based on the private ownership of the means of production, market competition for scarce goods, and economic inequality. This could, at
best, be considered a form of
social democracy -- but really it's not even that, since the Grand Nagus remains an unelected ruler who chooses their own successor, rather than it being decided by popular vote or by the legislature.
That's a pretty far cry from the anti-capitalist Federation where all material needs are provided for free of charge, no one needs money, there is no inequality, and the President is democratically elected.
