So what exactly is the reason to go on a ship and be blown away by enemy of week in Starfleet, if money is not a thing to worry about?
You've gotta be kidding, right? Just ask Star Trek fans: if the whole thing were real and Starfleet actually existed, how many people would sign up tomorrow?
It works great as long as someone's motivation in life is waste extraction. The problem comes when people don't want to do certain jobs - how do you offer an inventive when there's no additional reward, and they could live perfectly well not doing it.
A legitimate issue, of course. But we're talking about a society with a tech level where
most of those jobs simply don't require human labor any more. Waste extraction, for instance... I'd imagine most waste products (human, industrial, whatever) are just tossed into a hopper that decomposes them down to their constituent molecules, where they're available for later use by replicators that reconstitute them into other forms of matter. (And as a bonus, no more problems with pollution!)
With a little effort, of course, one can think of tasks that both (A) are undesirable, and (B) require human labor. In such cases, I'd expect that the trade-off is that people who devote some of their time to doing them have higher-priority access to the relatively few things left in society that are relatively scarce... say, real estate with a nice view. (Although even there, the availability of instant travel by teleportation would put less of a premium on such things... but there are bound to be some possibilities. Easier access to a table at the restaurants that still cook by hand, maybe?...) The basic point is that, in contrast to modern society, people who do crappy jobs (the kind that aren't their own reward) get rewarded
more in exchange for their labor rather than less. Certainly some people would take that deal.
...Plus inspire innovation and creativity without the competitive drive of money making.
I don't quite follow you here, but then I've never found competition to be particularly motivating, especially for creative activity. I recognize that some people do, though; presumably such people would direct their energies into activities where the competitive aspect is intrinsic — sports and games, for instance.
I've always maintained that the writers in 21st century America lack the language and reference points to describe a post scarcity economy, because we've never seen one to base it on. Plus there is a need to make it accessible to an audience familiar with transactional economic interactions, trading, buying and selling. So the economics of Star Trek become a handwave, and in themselves a kind of advanced magic you don't think too hard about.
Yeah, no argument here. There are people who spend a lot of time thinking about these things, but that's not the job of TV writers. As I said earlier, the show is not a thesis on sociology or economics; this is background stuff.
(Although among Trek fans, surely a lot of us have spent time reading utopian fiction and alternative economic theories and such, no?...)
But now comes the next question: where is the (pretense of) authenticity line drawn? Why not just replicated the clams pre-scrubbed? Or pre-cooked? And so on and so forth. But - ethical issues aside - maybe the clams are real and have been fished and suddenly we're into the realm of scarcity. Uh oh. And with that, suddenly there's a market for fresh real clams over pre-replicated ones.
Of course, Riker told us they don't do that anymore. So then there's that whole authenticity thing. But maybe the real reason people show up at Joe's is that he's the best creole around. But, there again, his culinary aptitude is the resource and has market value. So there needs to be some way to "gate" (for lack of a better term) it.
I mean in a world where there are no limitations on travel and is no language barrier, a guy who lives on Bourbon Street and a woman in Tokyo who both have equal claim to the clams. Come dinner hour, the line outside of Joe's might get pretty fricken long if everything is "free."
If no one is motivated to do the work any more, then the restaurant closes. Easy-peasy. It's worth keeping in mind that no one actually
needs a restaurant offering hand-scrubbed, hand-cooked food, certainly not in a society where an incredible variety of food is available instantly for free. It's a novelty thing... but if someone's interested in offering it, presumably some people will be interested in patronizing it.
And if there's too much demand to patronize it... well, see above re: crappy jobs. Also note that even today, even very popular restaurants get by just fine on a first-come, first-served basis; access is self-regulated by people's level of patience for waiting for a table, which really has nothing to do with how they pay for the meal in the end.
There are legitimate complicating issues here that you're touching on, of course. However, we don't necessarily need to frame them in terms of "markets." We should always keep in mind that (outside the dream worlds of Austrian economists) markets are not some emergent property of nature. They're always the product of some kind of social contract (which is to say, government); they are brought into being and sustained by it, and take a shape constrained by it. As a general rule, I consider markets to be effective mechanisms for mediating the distribution of fungible private goods with high elasticity of demand... but not particularly good for much else, and often self-subverting or downright inimical to more important societal goals.
There are just too many practicality cogs and too many logistical hiccups for no money/post-scarcity to ever be a thing.
See, here's where we disagree. Four hundred years ago, people might well have said the same thing about popular democracy and protected civil liberties... these were concepts only those ivory-tower enlightenment philosophers could take seriously, nothing that would never work in the real world!... but look, here we are today.
