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Economies of the Star Trek Civilizations

The Overlord

Fleet Captain
Fleet Captain
What kind of economic systems do the various Star Trek civilizations:

The Federation clearly has some form of socialist economy. The Ferengi Alliance is of course a form of laissez faire capitalism. The Klingon Empire seems to have some sort of feudalistic system. Its unclear what system the Cardassian Union had, but I assume from what we see of them, it would be a state capitalist system, I doubt there is much private enterprise on Cardassia, but they have a currency system, they seem to allow private enterprise in limited forms to exist under the state's authority, like Quark's Bar on Terok Nor and the officers seem to be open to bribes. No clue what system the Romulans have, we really don't know much about them. I'm not sure what kind of economy the Dominion has and economics doesn't apply to civilizations like the Borg.
 
The trouble I've found when I think about the Federation is not knowing just how far Earth's post-scarcity lifestyle has spread in regards to other member worlds.
I tend to assume that many of the core UFP worlds are as Jake Sisko and Picard noted in that they don't put much focus on monetary transaction any more simply because their tech has reached a point that makes it rather irrelevant.
As one goes further out into the non-core worlds one experiences more traditional economics as the technology that allows for said post-scarcity economics is less entrenched or simply non-existent(new colonies etc).
Of course all that would be modulated by the traditions and laws of individual member worlds.

I believe the Romulans in the novels have a fairly similar system to ours currently, though with several powerful families still making up the ruling class one could assume they hold a larger share of economic prosperity than private enterprise.

As to the Dominion - a command economy of sorts that exists to serve the Founders needs and whims. I imagine the Vorta are fairly ruthless at distributing resources around Dominion space. There may have been some of that in one or two of the DS9 novels.
 
The Klingon Empire sometimes seems mercantile, like The British Empire, even though we think of them as the show's Mongols.

Best example is when Quark went over the property portfolio of a noble house. Britain had the remnants of a feudal system, with Lords and Barons and Dukes, but was a merchant empire. In TOS they might have had something else, as everything seemed faintly totalitarian and organised - I always thought they went through some kind of modernising revolution in TOS's era, which subsequently regressed in TNG.

The Romulan Star Empire seems to resemble The Roman Republic in some instances; an Imperial Democracy (i.e. Senator Pardek). Maybe it's economy is therefore linked to secruity and expansion and wars of aggression and profit masked as police actions. Other times it has very statist tones, such as when we see a beurocratic panel in the "Continuing Comitee" - like a modern state beucrocracy.
 
The Cardassians and the Dominion represent to me Fascism, at least at the government level. At least that that's what they seem to me. Weren't the Caradassians represent Nazi Germany and the Bajorans represent the Jews from World War II?
 
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