Well, you know, when the Sith take over a galactic empire, you have to expect that sort of thing.
You know, if you want to live the kind of lifestyle people lived at the turn of the 20th century, you could probably do it while working one day a week. If you wanted to live by the standards of people in the 1950’s (who thought they were quite well off in general), you could do it by working 10 hours a week. But we don’t.
The notion that replicators will eliminate scarcity is naive. If material goods can be replicated, our values will simply change to be non-material. For example, today you can have a near-perfect reproduction of a sculpture or painting for a few hundred dollars. Yet people pay millions for the originals. Maybe in the Star Trek universe, the things of value will be antiques, original art, performance art, or personal servants.
And besides, there are clearly limits to replicator technology. I’d sure like my own Starship, but I clearly can’t have one. For that matter, when they build starships there are still hordes of engineers and technicians floating around putting it together, so there’s still a need for some kind of labor, and I don’t think they’re all doing it for yucks.
Another form of scarcity in the future might be real estate. How do you get your hands on an apartment on Earth if there’s no money? This is clearly prime real estate, and not everyone who wants to live on Earth can. So how do they divvy up the land? What if I want my own golf course? Is there room for that? Can I have my own floating cloud city? Perhaps my own planet to play around on?
One of the reasons utopian fiction is so boring is because it’s so unrealistic. I relies on people behaving in ways that do not mirror real life at all. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with Star Trek. None of it is even remotely believable. And I don’t mean the technology - I mean the whole structure of the society. It’s not even internally consistent - one episode they’re talking about money as some strange anachronism, and the next someone’s trying to steal something. Or they talk about how warmongering we poor 20th century humans were, what with our competition and greed and all, then they go off and get in fistfights over racial slurs or engage in border disputes.
And by the way, how come Picard owned those priceless antique artifacts? What gives him the right to have them, if there’s no money and he didn’t buy them? Did he win a contest? Or is the Picard family politically connected to the people who make the decisions about who gets what?
These are the kinds of issues that a really interesting Star Trek show could delve into. But then, that universe wouldn’t be so utopian anymore. Just more believable.
Unfortunately any new series that addressed this would destroy the fabric of Star Trek, as you pointed out the entire system doesn’t and couldn’t work. In the 23rd C Kirk et al went on endlessly about how there was no money, yet on DS9 they obsess about amassing “gold pressed latinum”. Not to mention countless other anomalies.
I enjoy Trek and will be going to see the new film in May, but presently other than the ways already mention here don’t see a future for it on tv. Maybe like Doctor Who in 1989 it needs a good long rest so that it can be revitalised once Berman, Braga and the rest can’t continue producing the same crappy storylines.