I hadn’t even thought of the other problems with the concept. You’d have prestigious sites for a coffee shop or restaurant that would be valuable. What about homes? Does everyone live in the same style and size of unit or could you better yourself into a huge mansion?
Heck, Flint could better himself into a whole planet, but he was 6000 years old and I presume he’d figured out how to game the system.
To win.
For sex. People are more likely to have sex with a winner than a loser. Some forms of currency aren’t going to be replaced by replicators and holodecks.
Kirk says it in Star Trek IV, when he makes Ms. Whale Scientist pay for dinner.
That’s a big ambiguous, though. Kirk doesn’t use “money”, in the sense that he carries around bills and coins, but he could easily have some kind of futuristicky (or even presenticky, for that matter) credit card not likely to be accepted by even a D-lister like Bob Sarlatte.
Anyway, the ultimate source of this conundrum is that Gene Roddenberry was an idealistic douche who was reacting to the perceived greed of the Reagan era.
In TNG and Deep Space Nine the characters run into collectors of rare items. This sounds like an interesting plot device on the surface but if you think about it you wonder that if the replicator could replicate anything except dilithium and latinum why not relipicate hundreds of copies of the Mona Lisa. Was there some way you could you tell the copy from the original? For that matter why not replicate copies of Data? The idea sounds good but it just doesn’t hold up to hard scrutiny.
Yep. And Tom Paris as well. Before Janeway grabbed him and made him a deal for parole.
When Tuvok and he were revealed to the Maquis, Chakotay was, of course, very surprised that Tuvok was a plant, but said that he wasn’t all that pissed at him because he was, after all, an officer doing his duty. Then he turned to Paris, in great contained anger, and simply accuses him of opportunism, mentioning latinum among possible motives.
Now, it’s one thing for the Ferrengi to be into latinum. They only have a tangential relationship to Federation society, and a completly different culture.
But Tom is an earther.
So Picard’s statement in *First Contact * is flatly contradictory.
In TOS, the idea was to avoid making any statements about future economic systems. Or currency. Sure, there were a few remarks about earning one’s pay, but non-specific even if they did actually refer to literal wages.
The other ST shows should have kept to that, IMHO.
- “Jack”
To Voyager: Mudd’s women as well.
Carbon dating. Any copies of the Mona Lisa would date from the 24th Century.
Besides, the real Mona Lisa has “This is a Fake” written under the paint in felt tip pen. Any x-ray will detect it. 
No, the Replicator would create the duplicate with a C14/C12 ratio consistent with the original’s at the time it was scanned/digitized.
Says that in your replicator user manual, does it?
Very true, but he was also pretty much considered a low-life by those around him. The same with Cyrano Jones.
Well, the relevant evidence is already presented:
The straightforward answer is that it doesn’t make any sense and the Star Trek universe is simply NOT self-consistent, and any attempt you make to resolve the issue will require a lot of invention, or ignoring parts of the shows and movies, or both.
Gene Roddenberry deserves great praise for the vision of his work, but he was also a stubborn ass and pedantic as all hell, and by the 1980s was allowing his utopian vision to get in the way of simple consistency and logic. It’s famously told that he didn’t like the direction “The Wrath of Khan” was going because he claimed the Enterprise wasn’t a warship, and the Federation was not a military outfit. This simply stunned everyone else working on the script and the movie since, of course, it’s no more consistent with the original series and the first movie than it is with Leave It To Beaver. It was so bizarre and illogical that they just had to start ignoring him.
There’s no point in trying to find an internal consistency in Star Trek with respect to economics, because there isn’t one. The claims made in the Next Generation series aren’t consistent with the original series and in fact don’t quite match up with references later on in itself, or any of the other spinoff shows.
IIRC There is frequent reference to “Replicator” products being vastly inferior to the real thing (often refering to food or synthaholic beverages). I always just assumed that durable goods would have the same “close but not quite” quality. This might be ok for replacement parts but would definately not stand up to any kind of close expert scrutiny for artifacts.
It also seems that the more complex an item is the longer it takes to replicate it. Parts for the drive or weapons or shields seem to take longer the worse they are needed. Again I just assumed this was because making these parts required more energy, which the dilithium crystals created from the hydrogen collected by the nacells. More complex parts = more energy needed = more hydrogen needed = more time needed to drift around space collecting it.
Federation crewmembers were often allowed and encouraged to “go their own way” even to the point of replicating components and building their own shuttle craft (although very slowly as the replicators use energy/hydrogen as mentioned above and taking resources away from the ship is a no-no) so perhaps this right was part of the compensation package for starfleet personell. I also imagine that, if replicators need energy to transform into matter, that energy itself (or hydrogen to react with the dilithium crystals) would be much more valuable than gold or diamonds. But with that said, it’s also possible that “Kirk’s Diamonds” were worth a fortune because they were original, non-replicated diamonds and thus collectors items.
Just my opinion of course.
He obviously wasn’t pedantic enough.
Guess when Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations
I don’t know that I would agree with your assessment really. Anarchy doesn’t work, so somebody has always, eventually, taken the reigns of any society. But generally once that’s happened, everyone was fine to let their job be inherited until there was a money motive to change it. And most wars and landgrabs were, at heart, generally for the sake of wealth gain. Every once in a while you would get a monarch or emperor who felt like going out and conquering someone just for the heck of it, but that’s pretty much the only example that fits your assertion.
Let me check my notes…
The odd thing is that the Replicator, as seen on the show, is an extremely finicky device and which doesn’t work with most things. They make halfway deecnt food given some specially made “raw foodstock.” That’s about it. Other stuff seems to be special order from actual manufacturing centers. They can’t replicate starships. In fact, heavy elements as a whole seem to be out.
They also changed their mind part way through TNG as to whether replicated food was better or worse than real stuff. In the episode where they met those cryo people from the 20th century the southron guy has a veritable orgasm over the martini the replicator produces and says it’s the best he’s ever tasted whilst from series 2 of TNG through DS9 and Voyager you can all but see them pinching their noses when their eating food from the replicator and harping on about how great real food is.
/Geekery
Well, the guy raving about the martini’s hadn’t had one in a couple hundred years, and was an alcoholic (Crusher mentions liver damage, IIRC), so his taste buds might have spasmed on 2.0 beer…
The truly miraculous device was the dayum holodeck. With that, they were able to figure out what was wrong with the ships engines by “simulating” the symptoms they saw, and further their understanding of physics (like warp theory). If the end result is truly supposed to be unknown (“Computer, let’s simulate a hypothetical particle…”), then the final answer shouldn’t be in the computer banks. If it’s not in the computer banks, how do they know the end result of the simulation was worth the time they spent on it?