Not really. It's implied that in Trek everyone's basic needs are taken care of. You are given housing, food is free, clothing is free, entertainment is open source.
It's implied in
TNG, and only because Picard and Riker say so. The situation with Jake is because he's a Starfleet brat, and so of course he spouts the Starfleet line.
It's more realistic to say that everyone's basic needs are taken care of
if you're in Starfleet. Picard is so clueless about how non-Starfleet economies work that he doesn't even know that prostitutes expect to be paid.
But... there's that pesky line of Crusher's, when she tells the guy on Farpoint Station to "charge it to my account on the Enterprise."
What's actually going to happen - will the Enterprise just replicate whatever units of currency used on Farpoint? I wasn't aware that counterfeiting is something Starfleet condones.
Credits are what you are given for engaging in "socially necessary work", tending gardens, being a doctor, being an researcher, being a crafter etc.
Who decides what constitutes "socially necessary work" or how many credits each kind of work is worth? For example, I would guess that most people on this forum would consider rock musicians and basketball players to be engaged in socially necessary work, but for me most rock music is just noise and basketball is pointless and neither are "socially necessary."
Credits can not be horded, they are not capital, thus they are not money, upon usage, they are "destroyed". The Picard Winery works 1000 hours to produce wine, they are given 1000 hours worth of credits at whatever rate their work is defined at and then they can spend those credits elsewhere say they spend it at a bar, but when the credits are paid to the bar, the bar doesn't get the credits, the credits vanish, people working at the bar are then given credits for how long they work at whatever rate they work.
So your idea is that it's "use it or lose it"? It's pretty obvious that in RL that tends to lead to frivolous, pointless spending for the sake of using up whatever funding is available, instead of carrying over to save up for something more expensive or in case of emergency. So 24th century people in this situation would carry on with frivolous use of their credits, since they couldn't save up for anything.
And speaking of the bar, how can it continue to exist if, say, it's a lousy bar with bad food and drink, surly employees, and nobody wants to go there? Do the employees still get their credits for working x number of hours? Does the owner get credits, or is the owner supposedly doing this to "better himself" and no other reason?
This system largely works in the time of Trek, because the credits are basically for "luxury", everything else you ever need is automatically given to you for free. You do not pay for housing, you do not pay for food, you do not pay for clothes etc. You live at a minimum, the standard of an upper-middle class person today, doing absolutely nothing. But if you want to transport around the world, travel to another planet, buy luxury goods etc you need credits. Also because people are freed from money, people largely work for passion. This is an alien concept to us today because Capitalism alienates one from their own labour, but it's proven through behavioural economics and sociology that people actually work harder and productivity rises if they are comfortable and are passionate about the work they are doing.
What happens if everybody who works as a janitor suddenly loses their "passion" for cleaning up after other people?
And seriously, how will a bartender's allotment of credits pay for passage to Risa, if he/she decides to vacation there, if it's not possible to save up for such a trip?
Forget "Fair Haven" (wouldn't mind if I could), I still remember when the crew rescued Janeway and "da Vinci" in "Concerning Flight" and her first concern, on getting to the ship, was "I have to go and check on the master!" Sweetie, he's a hologram. He'll be just the same tomorrow or next week. Meanwhile, maybe say "Thank you" to your crew, who just busted their backsides to rescue you! (I may or may not have actually snapped, "Don't say thanks, b*tch!" at the screen the first time I saw it.)
I would certainly check to see if John Rhys-Davies was okay.
The unimaginative naming conventions, chiefly the Romulans. "Hey, let's have a space Roman Republic (Roman Empire under Shinzon), naming them Romulans!"
I can forgive the titles being Roman because of the translators finding some equivalent, but the species name?
The ultimate eye-rolling moment with this naming convention was in one of the early TNG novels. Picard was up against a character named "Lucius Aelius Sejanus." I guess somebody thought it would be a cute nod & wink to the fact that Patrick Stewart played Lucius Aelius Sejanus in several episodes of the TV adaptation of
I, Claudius.
Now that you mention that, DS9 should have had their own fleet of shuttlecraft in addition to the runabouts.
The word "runabout" always annoyed me. It evokes the image of people running around aimlessly, without purpose.
Because they basically say this in TNG? That there is no poverty, no private ownership etc. You still have jobs but people don't work for money, they are most likely repaid in credits for their labour/energy.
Picard and Riker say it, but it doesn't make it true for everyone.
Voyager developed an on-ship economy involving replicator rations, holodeck time, and the barter system. People did save up their replicator rations and holodeck time so they could splurge for something special, or actually manage to go a month without having to eat leola root stew, and they traded and bartered their rations and holodeck time.
They petition the Federation for resources or engage with the non-Federation economy.
And what if the Federation says "no"? How do you engage with a non-Federation economy if you have nothing to engage
with? That's setting up conditions for a thriving black market - which, as we saw in numerous episodes - does a booming business.
And? You live in a society with completely different material conditions. You do not need money. You do not need to invest. everything is provided for you. TNG clearly states there is no private property within the Federation economy. The concept of capital and capitalist investment is completely alien to Jake.
Jake is a Starfleet brat. His father is high enough in the chain of command that neither of them have to worry about their basic needs, so of course Jake would be clueless as to how non-Starfleet connected people manage these things, never mind non-Federation people.
If there's no private property in the Federation, why wasn't Deanna happy to let Tasha root through her civilian clothing in "The Naked Now"? Since there's no private property, Deanna's outfits theoretically belong to everyone, so Tasha should be able to use them any time she wants when off-duty.
But instead, Deanna selfishly told her, "They're not for you" and Tasha found something in "ship's stores." Presumably that means she replicated the outfit she wore, but this isn't the first time Star Trek ever referred to "ship's stores."
Rand referred to that in "Charlie X" when she asked where Charlie got the perfume he gave her - because ship's stores didn't have that kind. I hope you're not suggesting that Rand could just tell the synthesizer she wanted "one bottle of perfume, ____ brand".
Why do you need to "Save up to invest"? You don't live in Capitalism. Credits exist, but socially necessary labour and energy, not capital is what credits represent.
Again, who decides what labor and energy are socially necessary? What if some form of labor is necessary but nobody wants to do it? What if everyone wants to do the same thing even though there's not really enough people interested in the output of what they do?
In TOS we see that Replicators don't exist (but synthesizers do) and resources are still carted around by cargo ships. There are plenty of reasons a colony may need to interact with the non-Federation economy if say, a cargo ship was destroyed by Klingons.
The synthesizers are for food. They're not replicators, in that they can synthesize just anything. If that were true, then there wouldn't be any problems where some vital drug is needed, and the whole backstory of "The Trouble With Tribbles" would fall apart. Who needs quadrotriticale when you can just replicate a sandwich any time you're hungry?
Also in TOS, the writers nor Roddenberry had really conceived of a larger Trek setting. I mean, for much of TOS, the Federation doesn't even exist. Most of Star Trek's world building started with the films and TNG and thus we have to project back onto TOS the worldbuilding that came later with the New World Economy.
Were we watching the same series? There were numerous references to the Federation in TOS, and a great deal of worldbuilding.
There were also numerous references to an economy in which everyone gets paid, and apparently Starfleet invested a great deal of money - Federation credits - in Spock's training. That suggests that it's not cheap to train a highly-ranked, highly-skilled Starfleet officer.
The Federation is clearly a Socialist society and not Capitalist. This is pretty clearly stated time and time again in TNG, Voyager and DS9 if you listen to what they are actually saying when they're spouting clearly Socialist concepts. The Federation characters in Star Trek from TNG to Voyager also clearly talk about Capitalism in a extremely negative and historic tone.
What "clearly Socialist concepts" do the Voyager characters "spout"? Tom Paris runs betting pools, and rakes in a considerable number of replicator rations and holodeck hours. In the early part of the series Janeway isn't happy about that and shuts it down.
Later on, however, I suspect she realizes that Tom Paris is one of the people on board who is generous enough to share his holodeck time and creations with the entire crew, so she looks the other way at the betting pools.
Janeway has a lot of negative and condescending things to say about the 23rd century, never mind the 20th century. But what she doesn't realize is that she's more like Kirk than she'd ever be willing to admit.
It's also backed up by the claim in several writings that Majel Barrett said Gene Roddenberry was a Socialist/Communist in his later life and the claim that has made it into several Trek books that TNG setting was inspired in part by Posadism. (A fringe, sci-fi alien Trotskyist sect who's vision for the future, happens to near be 1:1 identical to how the New World Economy and how humans contact aliens comes to be in Trek)
If you want to know how the economy in the Federation works. Read Socialist and/or Technocracy economic theories, because it's clearly what Roddenberry and the writers did.
I would suspect this video was likely watched by Roddenberry because I know it was very popular throughout the 80s and elements of it do seem to appear in Trek. (Deals with Money vs Credits at the 40 minute mark)
Yes, I'm sure the writers sat around reading books on socialism and the economy of communist countries. It's not like they had actual real jobs to do, that they could sit around reading this stuff that only Roddenberry himself was obsessed with.
Two options:
1) Because they hadn't concieved of the idea of "the Federation" when they coined the name and therefore assumed that the protagonists would be part of a US (or possibly UN)-centric spaceforce.
2) Because it was made by Americans for Americans.
NB: I agree that the prefix should be FSS (especially from TNG onwards set in an era of greater integration) rather than USS.
United Federation of Planets. United Starship Whateveritsnameis.
I don't see a problem.
