Comment by mandmandam
2 days ago
> What "The Federation doesn't have money" really means is, we don't want stories about Geordi worrying about how he's going to pay his nephew's rent or Data arguing about whether or not he his patent for some $TECH is being violated and he's not getting paid out properly. We don't want stories about how some medical issue could be fixed but Ensign Bob can't afford to pay for it. We don't want stories about Commander Sally arguing about her pay raise.
You don't seem to be acknowledging that rent goes down when basically anyone can start their own colony within a huge stretch of the galaxy, or that patents and wage comparison look kind of silly when everyone's basic needs are far beyond met, or that 'fixing a medical issue' becomes crazy cheap when replicator technology and computers are that far advanced.
> I would have written straight into the story bible that this is a framing device and authors are not to sit there and try to examine the details too closely
Star Trek: Lower Decks explored these ideas a bit more - right around the same time they were cancelled. Great episodes, highly recommend checking them out.
Read https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusD... . My point is Doylian; arguing about the Watsonian perspective is not a relevant rebuttal.
I would also observe that even from a Watsonian perspective that the idea that the Federation isn't exactly the utopia it is presented as is fairly easy to substantiate. For a society with "no disease" there sure are an awful lot of people with diseases. For a society that supposedly means that they have replicators and anyone can have what they want, the citizens read to me as extremely impoverished relative to that level of technology on the screen. They aren't deciding they want to head off to Risa for a vacation and just replicating themselves starships to get there. In fact Federation citizens seem to live in quite astonishing scarcity most of the time.
It makes sense from the Doylian perspective, though. The show isn't about the normal citizen and it would be very distracting to a 20th/21st century audience for them to be actually fabulously wealthy by any modern standard.