Cocytus wrote:Jedi Master Spock wrote:The amount of Jesus involved with Ted Cruz makes it a pretty tough match.
The Federation is an individualist and liberty minded society in the sense of being one which guarantees a list of freedoms; but it is one where the list of guaranteed individual freedoms includes
freedom from want. Which is not to be found on the agenda of most of those identified as conservative at present. I see it as a clear left-libertarian society. Right-libertarians might be able to see themselves living happily in such a society, but the presence of a social safety net and the fact that business is relegated to frontier settings (ala Mudd) or seen as recreational hobbies (ala Sisko) makes this different from an idealized right-libertarian society.
The profit motive is pretty much entirely absent. Capitalism - the use of ownership as a method of earning income - is conspicuously absent as well.
Most conservatives take issue with "freedom from" much of anything without rigid and rigidly enforced definitions. The "freedom from offense" that has taken hold on the political left at the moment leads to absurdities like safe spaces and produces coddled, infantilized children largely incapable of navigating a world that isn't obligated to care about their feelings. It empowers the most thin-skinned and emotionally fragile members of society to run roughshod over the rest.
"Freedom from offense," or "freedom from insult," isn't a phenomenon of the left. Not exclusively.
Pope Benedict pronounced much the same in response to the Denmark cartoon controversy. Muslims themselves are, globally, conservative, and similarly have endorsed "freedom from insult."
Conservative students
also issue complaints about being offended,
and making similar complaints about being "traumatized" by content they find politically disagreeable.
Censorship is an issue that cuts across traditional political lines. It's a fairly complex issue in that way; a lot of people want to see censorship
of the things they disapprove of. This may be insults aimed at religion. This may be sexual content. It might even be a political position.
The freedom from want that the Federation affords most of its citizens is the freedom from the most basic material wants, with such needs met via the replicators.
Point of order, by the way: Marx had an idea of what the future involved in a socialist society: Machines producing things for people with virtually no input of human labor. Modern Marxist thinkers often label these devices "replicators," because it fits very neatly.
References abound to Federation credits, which means that the "money-free" society Picard likes to brag about isn't really accurate. It's noteworthy that the two examples of him doing so that pop right into my mind are the rescued cryonics from "The Neutral Zone" and Lily Sloane from ST:FC, both of which involve Picard bragging about his society to someone whose society is inferior, the way a Westerner might brag to, say, someone from a third-world country. It's a feeling of superiority and not necessarily an accurate reflection of the truth. I've always thought that the paradise of Earth was sort of the idealized showroom of the Federation, with the reality being rather less than that elsewhere. The Federation obviously employs a money system to deal with races that use it (like the Ferengi) and reimburses the members of other races with whom its members do business (Dr. Crusher charges a bolt of cloth in Farpoint Station.) When far removed from the Federation, simple barter takes over, as happened many times on Voyager.
There is a money system, but ordinary Federation citizens don't have much cause for dealing with it directly... unless they're dealing with external entities.
Communist societies almost inevitably still used some form of currency system in some fashion, in practice.
The replicators afford post-scarcity as far as raw materials go, but there is still plenty of room for sourcing food and materials traditionally, or preparing finished items from replicated raw materials. Off the top of my head, Data makes Troi a traditional Samarian sunset in "Conundrum" Guinan offers Geordi and Data "something new from Forcas III," in ST:G, Kira complains about replicated food (though she was using a Cardassian replicator) the Promenade on DS9 is full of various themed restaurants and Quark is seen to both replicate finished drinks and prepare them, the Enterprise had a galley in ST:TUC, and it is known that replicators leave indicative patterns in the materials they make. It is also obvious, as well as outright stated in "Night Terrors" that more complex materials need more energy which is not illimitable given that Voyager nearly ran out in "Demon." All this means that "want" in the sense of something beyond pure survival needs is still there in the Federation, with the post-scarcity aspect extending only to those basic necessities.
I should clarify that "freedom from want," in context, means "freedom from lack," not "freedom from desire." He's not talking about everybody having beluga caviar; he's talking about them not going hungry.
What's left of an internal economy is about services and luxuries.
We also know that, from the time of Kirk all the way through Voyager, the concept of and protection of intellectual property are very much present. One of the obvious implications of the Doctor's being granted rights of personhood in "Author Author" was the power to control his IP, and both he and the elder Jake Sisko had publishers for their work. Taken with what I consider the well-demonstrated fact that replicators cannot produce perfect facsimiles of many things, a formal market structure still exists in the Federation. It just no longer applies to survival necessities like basic food, water and medicine. It would still apply to energy though, and we hear in Voyager of replicator rations. This gets even more apparent when you consider collectibles markets. Antiquities are dealt with frequently in the Federation and its environs. Quark presides over auctions, Vash finds rarities to sell, Picard expresses his admiration for the artistry of the Kurlans (at least until he carelessly discards the naiskos at the end of Generations. In universe, I like to think he replicated a copy and sent the real one for safekeeping elsewhere, given his reverence for antiquities and the frequent danger the E-D finds herself in.) None of this would be possible if the replicator were good enough to produce perfect copies of such items. The entire concept of a collectibles market would be vitiated if authenticity and provenance could not be established. Jake and Nog have to try and buy the Willie Mays card from the doctor in "In the Cards." Jake repeatedly says he has no money because he's human, and brags to Nog rather like Picard brags to Lily. It simply isn't true that humans have no money of any kind. Rather, the case seems to be that there's nothing in the way of physical currency. The Federation simply reimburses other races for expenditures its members make based on its credit as a major power with significant resources. Jake, being a kid, would probably have some sort of small credit account for buying Jumja sticks or whatever, but he had nowhere near enough to afford the card, Quark deals in physical currency anyway and likely none of the officers would have had enough credit to afford it either.
The major paradigm shift between the Federation and our current society I see as something along the lines of basic income. With the bare necessities met, work becomes something people do more for pleasure and self-fulfillment than profit, though that motive does still exist in one form or another. The basic income would establish a floor, but not a ceiling.
Support for a basic income is very much a left-wing phenomenon, rather than a right-wing one. Basic income is a step past where modern European welfare states are.
I wouldn't say that Star Trek is doctrinaire Marxist, but if we think of Federation credit being issued by the Federation to its citizens, the Federation operates to the economic left of virtually every developed nation on the face of the modern-day Earth.