Well, the Bajorans basically let the Feds run DS9, but it is still a Bajoran station (Odo was the head security guy, and he’s not Starfleet). Some Federation rules apply (Quark couldn’t stage vole fights because they were cruel, there’s a limit on gambling, that sort of thing), but to the extent that no one gets hurt, it seems that commerce is alive and well on Deep Space Nine.
It seems the Feds are all but alone in not using money. Certainly the Ferengi, Cardassians, Bajorans, and everyone out in that neck of the woods uses some means of exchange, which generally seems to be gold-pressed latinum. So, yes, Quark’s in it for profit, so was Garak’s tailor’s shop, and so was the Klingon restaurant.
What I’d heard was that although the Feds don’t use money, when they’re interacting with folks who do, they can use Federation “credits.” What this entails, I’m not sure, except that perhaps now that the Feds are all Godless Communists (well, they are atheistic and share their resources), there may be a stockpile of money somewhere for dealing with those less enlightened alien types. :rolleyes:
The whole “no money” thing is a fairly new idea. In TOS, the Starfleet officers were paid in “credits” just like Americans are paid in dollars. I don’t recall ever actually seeing a credit, however, so it might have been a 100% electronic system.
I haven’t kept up with TNG, DS9, or VOY very carefully, so something in those shows may blow my reading of this, but I’ve always interpreted “no money” as just meaning “no cash”–a pure credit/debit system. Certainly, in TOS, they used credits for personal purchases (tribbles, for example: “That’ll be 10 credits.”) I would assume that in dealing with cultures that use a physical medium of exchange, they either deal with someone who has established an account with the Bank of the Federation, or directly, or they go to a local bank that does have an account and “buy” the local medium.
Maybe in the Federation, it’s all about status, priveledges, and to ‘better-ourselves’, as mentioned by Picard in ST:FC.
As for the native tribes, I don’t think they’ll be 100% innocent of the current ST technology. They’ll probably live their own way of life but with improvements such as replicators, transport vehicles, or whatever they need to meet the basics, even though they can pretty much do that on their own.
Religion? I think they do exist in ST (not sure about TNG though, but the others do as argued by others), but I remember seeing a commentary about Roddenbury’s vision of ST, where all are equal, and since it came out in the turmoil of the 60’s, I think he wanted to hit the theme of ‘Imagine there’s no religion… and all live as one’. If not, maybe it was just too complicated to implement the Earthy mundane faiths in ST and they want to avoid offending anyone of a particular religion by promoting another.
I can understand why Trek wouldn’t want to deal with this topic, but the scenario you posted, which is the way I think it would have gone in the Trek world, would have led to the destruction of those peoples and their culture. This isn’t like the American Indians they show. True, they have their own rich culture, but they are very much part of the modern world. Native peoples in the rain forests, however, are a different story. If you’re a guy living in the Amazon with a likelihood of living to the ripe old age of 60, living without running water and the like, and subsisting on monkeys, capybaras, and fruit, and all of a sudden you discover that you can travel to other worlds or live in one of earth’s cities without rent, if all of a sudden the cultures of hundreds of planets are open to you, are you going to say “no thanks, I’d rather stay here in the Amazon”?
Now, on one hand this looks like progress–this guy will live a longer, healthier, more educated life and have opportunities of which he never could have dreamed. On the other hand, though, if he and his people leave the rain forest to become good little Federation citizens, their culture and history will die, never to return, except in some holosuite program. The diversity of culture will die.
In A Stitch in Time, Andrew Robinson has Garak musing about just that reality–to paraphrase, he said something along the lines of “the Federation are like gardeners: they grow beautiful things, but every time they pull a weed they make themselves murderers. They have destroyed as much as they have created.”
(well, they are atheistic and share their resources), there may be a stockpile of money somewhere for dealing with those less enlightened alien types. :rolleyes: