Actually, in the 23rd century, it makes perfect sense. The whole "moneyless society" thing didn't come along until TNG. Yes, Kirk said in TVH that they don't use money in the 23rd century, but TOS was full of references to money and capitalism -- Harry Mudd and Cyrano Jones as businessmen/traders, the "rich lithium miners" in "Mudd's Women," credits as a unit of currency in "Catspaw," "Mirror, Mirror," and "The Trouble With Tribbles," Kirk telling Scotty he'd earned his pay for the week in one or two episodes, Kirk saying in "Errand of Mercy" that Starfleet had invested a great deal of money in his and Spock's training, Spock in "The Apple" reporting just how much money they'd invested in his training, Flint in "Requiem for Methuselah" and Carter Winston in "The Survivor" described as having great wealth, etc. There's no question that capitalism was alive and well in the 2260s. The most logical interpretation of Kirk's TVH line is that they don't use currency because they've switched to a purely virtual/electronic credit-based system -- as we increasingly have today with things like credit cards and PayPal.
Almost all of those references to money dealt with outsiders of the federation.
Actually, no -- I specifically picked mentions that
were pertaining to the Federation. Many of them pertain to the
Enterprise crew itself. You're just deliberately rationalizing them away because they don't fit your prejudices, and that's improper reasoning.
Kirk telling Scotty he earned his pay was most likely an expression, a vestigial idiom.
"Most likely" based on what evidence? All the evidence you have a moneyless society comes from
a century after the time frame we're talking about. There is only a
single piece of evidence, Kirk's line in TVH, that even hints at a lack of money in the 23rd century, and quite a lot of evidence that money and commerce are still taken for granted in that time. A lot can change in a hundred years, so it's very unwise to try to draw conclusions about the 23rd century based on evidence that comes almost exclusively from the 24th.
As you pointed out, Kirk clearly says they don't use money in the 23rd century, so even if the no money thing wasn't planned from the beginning, it was retconned. Federation doesn't use money in the 23rd century.
That's sloppy reasoning, and if you tried anything like it in a history class, you'd get an F. You just can't make an assumption like that based on one uncorroborated data point. As I said, in the context of the evidence we have, it's far more likely that he was talking about not using currency.
The thing is, you're looking back on this based on the assumptions introduced by the ST of the '80s and '90s. You're used to the idea of "Federation = moneyless" and that assumption is coloring your perception of TOS. But I grew up with TOS in the '70s, and I can assure you that prior to TVH's release in 1986, there was
never any question that the Federation was a money-based society. And there's no good reason
not to accept that that was the case. Trying to rationalize away all the monetary references as you've done is overly convoluted and unnecessary, and some of your rationalizations are rather implausible. Accepting that there was money only requires rationalizing away a
single reference, the TVH line, and there's a very plausible fix for that, since many people actually do equate the term "money" with physical currency (and since the conversation in the restaurant was specifically in reference to money as physical currency). By Occam's Razor, the more likely interpretation is the one that requires the fewest
ad hoc speculations -- in this case, the fewest and simplest rationalizations. And that means the more likely interpretation is that there was still money in the 2260s.
I think it's quite likely that all those corporations would cease to exist after World War III kills 600 million people and many of the planets major governments and cities have been completely destroyed. I mean do you really expect me to believe that pretty much every world government is destroyed, along with their economies, but somehow Nokia survives and is still selling outdated cell phones in the 23rd century?
Okay, talk about your
ad hoc assumptions. Where did you get the idea that the destruction was so wholesale? We've seen that San Francisco and Paris are still intact, and heard reference to numerous other Earth cities surviving, such as New York, Moscow, Kyoto, Brussels, Brisbane, Dakar, Lisbon, and Rome. And the nations and societies don't seem too different post-WWIII -- there's still a France, an England, an Ireland, a Russia, a Japan, a Canada, a United States (though that's part of "NorthAm" by the 24th century), etc.
Anyway, the Memory Alpha article says only that
many cities and governments were destroyed. How do you get from "many" to "pretty much every?" You're not interpreting the evidence accurately, and there's plenty of evidence that contradicts your rather odd interpretation. Clearly most of the culture we know survived intact into the Trek era. In addition to all the mentions of familiar cities and countries, the cultures are recognizable and the characters still have plenty of knowledge of the popular culture, literature, fashions, music, etc. of earlier times. If all of that survived, it's really rather contradictory to assume that somehow corporations in particular managed to get exterminated en masse.
So WWIII pretty much had to be a limited nuclear war -- otherwise humanity wouldn't have survived at all. The destruction had to be targeted and limited. Now, Nokia, for what it's worth, is a Finnish company. Does it really seem likely to you that Finland, which is considered one of the most peaceful countries on Earth, would've been targeted for annihilation in a nuclear conflict?
As for that "outdated cell phones" reference, as I already mentioned, it falls apart on the basis of the fact that the commpanel we saw was
in an antique car from the 1960s.
