History of Star Trek having no "money"

[Tenacity]

Or the "not money" thing is just something that Picard keeps using owing to the fact that he is increadibly cheap.

Waiter: "Here is bill sir, I shall be your cashier."
Picard: "Oh ... haven't you heard? There no longer is money."
Waiter: "Look, just pay for your slugs and pancakes."
Picard: "It was escargot and crepes."

Waiter graps Picard by the ankles and skakes until credits cover the floor.

Waiter: "No money huh?"

 

[Tallguy]

The money issue really is as convoluted as Starfleet's status as a military. At times we really would be better off ignoring the things established in the rules for no real reason other than "because Gene said so."

Roddenberry wrote Mudd's Women AND The Omega Glory. And in both scripts characters want to get RICH.

So WHERE did the idea come from that there is no money in Star Trek? Did it come from Roddenberry? And when? These are the answers I'm looking for.

Not if. But why.

 

[psCargile]

There has to be an exchange of value for there to be an economy, otherwise it's all theft and slavery.

 

[drt]

Roddenberry wrote Mudd's Women AND The Omega Glory. And in both scripts characters want to get RICH.

So WHERE did the idea come from that there is no money in Star Trek? Did it come from Roddenberry? And when? These are the answers I'm looking for.

Not if. But why.

It seems more like something he would have thought of for TNG once he was all in with his new age gurudom.

 

[Tenacity]

Not if. But why.

Outgrowth of Roddenberry's 1970's college lecture tours and the gradual building in his own head of the utopian B.S. that Star Trek supposedly represented.

I'll have to go back through the TNG directors and witers guild (bible), but I don't recall any mention of a no money society. In fact I think there was something in there about one of Starfleet's jobs being protecting trade and commerce in the Federation.

 

[The Wormhole]

So WHERE did the idea come from that there is no money in Star Trek? Did it come from Roddenberry? And when? These are the answers I'm looking for.

Memory Alpha does say it was Roddenberry who decreed No Money when TNG started. No explanation as to why.

 

[Kor]

Outgrowth of Roddenberry's 1970's college lecture tours and the gradual building in his own head of the utopian B.S. that Star Trek supposedly represented.

Exactly. He came up with all this new-agey utopian baloney years after the fact of TOS, when it never had anything to do with Star Trek in the first place. So in later productions, he tried to shoehorn that stuff in as his "vision" for Trek.

Kor

 

[The Old Mixer]

It means that when the merchant tried to charge the sale to Crusher's account, he found that there was no such account, and by that time the Enterprise was long gone, Crusher was somewhere in space laughing at him, and there was nothing he could do about it.

That would explain why the Federation has so many enemies....

 

[Kemaiku]

The TNG era is frequently stated to have abandoned money, most directly in In The Cards and ST: First Contact. To my knowledge the only direct reference to the concept in the TOS era is Voyage Home - both the line you cite and the bit in the restaurant where Gillian guessed they don't have money in the 23rd Century, and Kirk says "Well, we don't." As you point out though, both of these could be interpreted as meaning physical money, rather than currency more broadly.

My personal interpretation is that the Federation moved to a moneyless economy between the TOS and TNG eras with the perfection of the replicator, and that it is still a matter of political interest in the time of Picard (who is clearly a strong believer) and Sisko (who perhaps takes a more practical, frontier sort of view).

The Ferengi episode of Enterprise establishes that Earth hasn't had money or commerce for decades.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

That would explain why the Federation has so many enemies....

Turns out that the Ferengi aren't really greedy, they're just disgruntled bill collectors!

 

[Tribble puncher]

Thanks.

What would stop them from just replicating money? Imagine Voyager enters a system that does use currency. Let's say, Neelix gets his hands on some local money, goes back to the ship, makes more and then goes back to buy what they need. Unethical? It would still be money.

I have this vision of one of those "Grey Aliens" wearing a cheap Richard Nixon mask, walking into a bank, asking for "One Earth Dollar Please" and walking out......

 

[FormerLurker]

The Ferengi are a society of packrats. It isn't wealth they all want, it's stuff. Each and every one of them is a hoarder in the making, and the ones that are the most successful are the ones that do the best at hiding it. Like Quark's cousin and his moon. I'm willing to bet it's covered with all the stuff he's collected over the years.

 

[Tallguy]

The Ferengi episode of Enterprise establishes that Earth hasn't had money or commerce for decades.

But Mudd's Women, Devil in the Dark, and The Trouble with Tribbles establish that it has. Why does Enterprise get the right of way?

 

[Arpy]

I don't know where the no-money thing came from in the real world, but in Star Trek IV you get the sense that Trek might have reached a place in popular culture where it was again saying hey be better than this. In retrospect it's easy to look at TOS with it's multi-racial, multi-gender, +1 Soviet, cast and let it rest on its progressive laurels. Most of us who are Trek fans became so with that as a starting point, despite its break from accepted reality of generations past.

Well, ST:IV reminds us that "the human adventure is just beginning." Not only will a black woman be a bridge officer, but we will look back one day and remember the silliness of having to deal with money to get on with our lives or use swear words to communicate effectively (Double dumbass on YOU!). To quote Spock from TOS, "Change is the essential process of all existence."

And Trek has been lagging in its progressivism over the decades: see how long it took for them to introduce a gay character in Trek before ST: Beyond. In ten or twenty years the first passable AI's will come around and if there's Trek still on the air, prepare yourselves for a slew of retro-continuity there too. It looks like Star Trek: Discovery may already be doing something similar with robots.

 

[Kemaiku]

But Mudd's Women, Devil in the Dark, and The Trouble with Tribbles establish that it has. Why does Enterprise get the right of way?

Fixing issues with TOS has been the job of most of the subsequent series. Why does the series that had established nothing solidly and broke it's own continuity so long ago and so much get such praise?

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Fixing issues with TOS has been the job of most of the subsequent series. Why does the series that had established nothing solidly and broke it's own continuity so long ago and so much get such praise?

Because it was the best series out of the bunch.

And "established nothing solidly"? Seriously? Geez, it only established Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, the Enterprise, Starfleet, the Federation, the Prime Directive, Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, warp drive, phasers, photon torpedoes, and all the other stuff that the subsequent shows have been building on for half a century. So what if they didn't assign specific years to stuff?

It's not the job of the subsequent series to "fix issues with TOS." It's their job to make good TV shows. That's all.

 

[Tallguy]

Fixing issues with TOS has been the job of most of the subsequent series. Why does the series that had established nothing solidly and broke it's own continuity so long ago and so much get such praise?

Because four other TV shows and eleven movies have held it up more often than not. Even on things like "Klingons always had head bumps" DS9 and Enterprise came along and said "No they didn't! It was just like TOS!"

This wasn't a case of nailing down 23rd or 29th century, or changing Khan from being selectively bred to genetically engineered. This was something that TOS and even early TNG was unquestionably consistent with.

The more I think about it the more I'm astonished that Roddenberry actually took an idea that was established somewhere else and not by him.

 

[Tracy Trek]

Exactly. He came up with all this new-agey utopian baloney years after the fact of TOS, when it never had anything to do with Star Trek in the first place. So in later productions, he tried to shoehorn that stuff in as his "vision" for Trek.

Kor

So he probably came up with the "no money" rule and the idea of contract marriages at the same time.

 

[Tallguy]

So he probably came up with the "no money" rule and the idea of contract marriages at the same time.

Poor Lori...

 

[Kemaiku]

Methods of compensation to other species outside of the Federation does not mean they possess any internal financial systems of their own.