Capitalism is a helluva drug
Capitalism is a helluva drug
Capitalism is a helluva drug
We make enough food on this planet to feed 10 billion people. In the US we have 10 empty houses for everyone that’s experiencing homelessness.
We have enough for everyone but under capitalism it doesn’t get distributed to everyone who needs things. Replicating more food or homes wouldn’t solve the problem.
I don't know about the 10 billion number. But if it's true, then we only have a 25% margin on food (10/8), and to my engineering mind that's not enough. We gotta pump those numbers up.
But if it’s true, then we only have a 25% margin on food (10/8), and to my engineering mind that’s not enough. We gotta pump those numbers up.
Or, and I'm just spitballing here, we should make sure everyone gets enough food first, then work on increasing production. What's the point in getting to a 50% or even a 100% margin on excess food production if people are still starving to death because we can't get it to them?
It’s almost like artificial scarcity means we could progress without having profit as a driving factor, and it’s not like people wouldn’t ever work. Hell productivity is to a point that 10hours a week can do what we did sixty years ago in a 40.
Some wouldn’t work but everyone would get bored eventually and learn for fun or go try 52936729362 different jobs.
Some wouldn’t work
Very few wouldn't
UBI enough to have enough, then any wages on top of it. More than enough would gladly work 20/hrs a week doing the necessary tasks so their lives can be nicer.
We'd also see crime drastically drop. Who would risk jail when they have a decent life to lose?
For real... I've never understood the obsession with trying to line everything up with reality. Like I get trying to ground it but I mean it's the future. Who the fuck knows how things are gonna change?
That's why I loooooove Trek so much. Does remind me of one of my favorite Trek scenes.
Thermianism can be fun, it's the selectivity that gets me. The fact that so many Trekkies will more readily accept FTL than a moneyless society is... something.
You know I never really thought of it from that perspective before. That is kind of insane. I guess not super surprising. With every Trek and something new people get really upset about something that is different than what they're used to. Why wouldn't that apply to certain parts of the whole core concept? Does seem like it requires some loopy cognitive dissonance to get to that.
There's a few reasons why the advanced technology might be easier to accept without question than the society without money.
Start Trek isn't immune to the language thing either, even with the universal translator. Why do Klingons switch in and out of Klingonese, even when on their homeworld, at their official hearings surrounded by their own people?
That is a fascinating observation. FTL, replicators, transporters, etc. DS9 kind of ruined the illusion since they toyed with latinum so much with the Ferengis
As far as I am aware, the lack of money is specific to Earth. Not the entire federation. Starfleet personnel get per diems as mentioned in DS9 when stationed somewhere other than Earth. You think Quark is letting everyone use the holosuites and eat and drink for free? If they want free food, they have the replimat. Even that isn't "free;" you have rations because even replicated food costs energy (the idea being very prevenlent in Voyager).
What gets me is that they have also mentioned that putting things back in the replicator to be broken down somehow replenishes a bit of that energy... Wouldn't it take a shitton of power simply to turn the material back into elemental particles? 🤔
I have mostly chalked that up to DS9 being pretty bad at being a Star Trek show. Seriously, if they wanted to make Babylon 5 they should have just made Babylon 5.
Voyager dealing with scarcity makes sense for their premise, but the point is Trek society is supposed to be post-scarcity, at least on the Federation side. If they can use matter/energy conversion to cook and travel then it just doesn't make sense to assume any limits to consumption. Trek society isn't just not capitalist, it simply can't be capitalist. They had to come up with some reeeal stretchy garbage to justify DS9 having a currency and people paying it for stuff like drinks and entertainment in a world where they are still beaming themselves around.
I mean, they have a perfectly good planet right there, let alone a wormhole that is supposed to make them a commerce hub. And they aren't going anywhere, they literally just need to keep the lights and replicators going to be self-sustainable indefinitely, as opposed to flying around at faster than light speeds by warping the fabric of spacetime. Somebody explain to me how come Quark gets to charge people for a cup of tea in that context.
Somebody explain to me how come Quark gets to charge people for a cup of tea in that context.
Simple.
He's a greedy Ferengi and not part of the Federation.
Also: The Bajorans down on the planet you speak of exchange currency. The planet doesn't have the infrastructure to be post-scarcity... That's, like, the entire premise for the show. They're getting assistance from the Federation to help rebuild after the Cardassian occupation while also petitioning to join the Federation.
The most flimsy explanations are actually just how Earth operates a currency-less society. They trade. They barter. They simply don't have money. Most every race that isn't capable of producing a resource they want trades. And some of those races also happen to value currency in the form of liquid metal wrapped in gold. 🤷🏻♂️
The image got cut off, I'm interested in hearing the remainder of this 4,000 word rant...
Paraphrased from something I got hit with on /r/DaystromInstitute, years ago
I could go find it but... reddit 🤮
The Ferengi are capitalist as hell
It's not even a very hard argument to make.
Any honest examination of the economics of the very wealthy will reveal that there is a fundamental upper limit to the quantity of goods and services that any single individual will consume, on average.
Once you accept the idea that consumption is bounded, then the cost the post scarcity utopia becomes finite. It is not infinite. Once you accept that the cost is finite, then you're only arguing about orders of magnitude.
It is certainly true that the natural consumption limit of humans appears to exceed the per capita GDP of any country in 2024. But this is a show about the future, and about a society that has mastered energies far above our own
To be fair, its certainly possible to imagine some people still having desires that even the federation couldnt fulfill except for a small number of people. Like, if someone wanted to have their own private star system or something. Of course the answer for any (or almost any I suppose) hypothetical post scarcity civilization will be that they are only post-scarcity for those things needed to live a comfortable life and not literally beyond all scarcity (I mean I guess in star trek maybe the Q have something like that, but they're not the protagonists for a reason, its hard to write a compelling story with entities like that as the main cast)
It is beyond all scarcity, though. Even pre-holodeck matter replication is supposed to be cheap enough relative to the energy density that it's cheaper to replicate food than store supplies. I mean, think about it. They are coaxing energy together so hard it makes atoms, and arranging them so precisely they 3D print objects. In a matter of seconds. Either the Federation has the most disproportionately expensive space program in the universe or making stuff is entirely trivial. Keep in mind that if you live on Earth you aren't doing FTL travel at the same time as you replicate stuff, so all that energy production should be going straight to making things.
And post-holodeck you can have literally anything you want as long as you have access to one. Zero limits beyond your physical body staying inside the room. That seems to be the sole difference between Federation members and the Q. They just seem to put a big cultural premium on "real" stuff, which I guess makes sense in a world where everything is 3D printed and every civilian has the fashion sense of a 1970s lounge chair that exploded onto a person for some reason.
Sure. And you might even have people who become addicted to consumerism. (Replicator use disorder?). You can still cut those individuals off and credibly claim to have a post scarcity society.
The point of post-scarcity is that, on average, you're not making difficult choices about which goods and services to consume.