Federation does have money.

[chaos42]

Ok this is something that has gotten annoying and I just need to say it out loud so i can. The Federation does have money. I know shocking but its repeatedly mentioned in TOS -credits. As well as in other areas. Plus i hate to point this out ALL of the trade deals have to be done in some sort of currency because thats why money was invented. Money is not evil -grevices. And there is no way the federation can get something they need to work for with out some form of compensation. like miners for ore, dilythium or any of the other things you can't replicate after those where introduced. People have to get something to exchange. Now if your saying thats against the rodenberry ideal i have a counter to that. One what they say is partly true, its not that they don't have money, but you don't need money to live in the federation. In other words your basic cost of living is provided for you but thats it, if you don't want to work you don't have to you will still have cloths food and shelter. but if you want to make your life better you have to work for it.

Also even if you deny people personally having money in the federation, the trade they get into would need some other wise they have no way to conduct business with cultures that do. Barter only gets you so far and what about odd numbers that will show up like if your trading 100 units of A for 75 units of B so a 4-3 exchange what happens when you get to a unit of the product that isn't divisible by that number some one loses out. So over all i wish people would stop saying in star trek they don't have money.

[Darth Wedgius]

Star Trek is inconsistent about money. Scotty bought a boat, but Jake Sisko can't buy a baseball card. Uhura was going to buy a tribble but Kirk notes that Americans in the 1980s are "still using money." Picard noted that they'd moved beyond the quest for material gain, but, in Encounter at Farpoint, Crusher bought some cloth, saying "Charge to Doctor Crusher." The dilithium miners in Mudd's Women were rich, according to Harry Mudd.

It might be that there is money for luxury items, which a tribble, a boat, and a bolt of cloth might count as. But I don't think all the Federation's use of currency can be written off that easily.

[CharlesPhipps]

This is going to blow people's minds but....Star Trek has inconsistent writing.

In the 80s we liked to pretend all Star Trek media had one perfectly consistent worldview but we know in fandom now that a lot of the time the writers didn't care and money was one of those issues where they 1:] didn't care 2:] actively disagreed. 3:] Went back and forth on it. OFFICIALLY, I believe the answer is the Federation has Replicator Credits but these are not considered money on Bajor or tradeable for legal tender.

And if you wonder how the Federation engages in Trade Deals, the set up in-universe is the Federation is a Post-Scarcity economy where they have such mind-numbing wealth that almost all deals for what they do need is done via barter economy. Federation merchants, who do exist, have to accumulate foreign currency like Latinum in order to do business.

This is all by TNG/DS9, though.

[MissKittyFantastico]

It doesn't really address the inconsistencies like Jake claiming he has literally no means of paying for something (I always took that as more of a lighthearted gag from the writers anyway, just for the sake of setting up the plot and having fun), but I feel it's more or less established that humans (i.e. Earth) doesn't have money, not the entire Federation - there's a Bank of Bolius (Morn knocked it over), they're Federation members. One could imagine there's an overall Federation Credit currency, which each Federation member's economy has a relationship with according to its specific needs and quirks; Earth's quirk is that humans don't need wealth because there's nothing to 'buy' that isn't freely available, so maybe when they venture out and interact with other economies the Federation as a whole picks up their bills - for Starfleet officers anyway - because humans aren't greedy and won't max out the Bolian Express card anyway, and it's a fair trade for having a Federation member that does 90% of the heavy lifting of running Starfleet and stepping up to the plate whenever the Romulans or Cardies try to start something.

How that functions in day-to-day life for the average human - like, why do janitors show up for work, are the replicator maintenance guys keeping everything going just because they feel immense satisfaction in maintaining replicators, have we as a species really changed that much that there's not a sizeable percentage of the population just living 24/7 in a holodeck running Program Sasha Grey Alpha... I dunno, I feel like it's on a par with the Enterprise technical manual, it's fun to puzzle over this or that detail, but there comes a point where you just have to accept the answer to how the Heisenberg compensators work is "very well, thank you."

[Nessus]

Arguments about the economy or political structure of the Federation always seem to me like the people involved are forgetting that this is science fiction. By which I don't mean that "anything can happen" type of laziness, but rather that it's based in the relatively far future, with a lot of advancement being assumed.

There's going to be a lot of things that we won't understand, and the writers can't describe in detail without de-facto inventing them for real. We take this for granted with pure technological advancement like warp drives and such, but for some reason, some people can't extend that expectation to social sciences. I assume that the way the Federation works isn't easy for us to understand because it's meant to be based on concepts in psychology, economics, and political theory that haven't been developed or discovered yet.

Moreover, I take it as a given that a chunk of current real-world understanding of these things is probably wrong in ways we don't understand yet. Psychology as a science is still pretty much in it's infancy. Economics is so intertwined with political ideologies that it's almost impossible to find an even partially objective macro theory, to say nothing of the HUGE issues it has with people treating their favorite untested (or even falsified) hypotheses as if they were empirically proven. All the social sciences are "soft", meaning it's hard to to empirically test complex ideas to begin with. It's almost a certainty that a non-trivial chunk of current theory in these areas may be about as valid as bodily humors.

Even with the hard sciences there's a lot of stuff where our ability to nitpick and say "no it wouldn't/can't work that way" is compromised. With soft social sciences, that area of uncertainty is going to be much larger. We are far, far more likely to discover we were wrong about foundational concepts in psych, econ, or pol-sci than we are are to discover we were wrong about foundational concepts in physics or chemistry.

And looking at history as a whole, advancement progresses roughly logarithmically or exponentially, not linearly. So realistically a society of 400 years from now is much less likely to be understandable to us then our society is likely to be understandable to people of 2000 years ago. If anything, Federation society is incredibly conservative in how similar it is to what we know (which is understandable, since it's a TV show, and it wouldn't do to confuse and alienate the audience).

[Fianna]

Star Trek seems to go back and forth on whether it's a post-scarcity society or not.

Given the technology the Federation has, it's not unreasonable to think that replicators would make resource shortages a thing of the past, and that almost all jobs could be fully automated; a handful of jobs would still require human labor, but they'd be few enough that they could be staffed by civic minded volunteers, while everyone else only "works" as a hobby.

But then you get references to trade deals and mining for resources, and a rather ridiculously low level of automation in most places. Like, we see Quark would gladly replace all his waitstaff with robots or holograms if he could, yet apparently in the next four hundred years no one's successfully made restaurant servers obsolete.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I'd get on board with what everyone else has said in saying that Trek is really inconsistent on this subject. I'd also add that it doesn't seem to even occur to the TOS writers that there is no money in the Federation.

As far as I can recall, the first mention of something to that effect is in The Voyage Home, and it was for the sake of a gag. They could have easily gone on to say that Kirk simply meant that they didn't have paper currency or the USD, but by early Roddenberry was trying to sell the idea of the no greed, post-scarcity, no money utopian future, so there are some quotes indicating that.

This all left later writers with the problem of trying to justify those inconsistencies, and it seems to me that they've generally agreed that the Federation doesn't use money. DS9 might be the strongest on the subject, which is kind of funny because the subject is brought up mostly to implicitly criticize/poke fun at the Roddenberry ideal.

[chaos42]

Thats the point though there is a form of currency and there are numerous references to money so why do we keep seeing this there is no money thing proliferated when its so obviously false.

[CharlesPhipps]

Thats the point though there is a form of currency and there are numerous references to money so why do we keep seeing this there is no money thing proliferated when its so obviously false.

Because it's an important plot point money is so unimportant they don't even believe they have it?

[FaxModem1]

It's inconsistent. Doylist answer, they didn't really hammer down how things worked in the writers room, which led to inconsistent portrayals of how everything works.

Watsonian, they do have currency, but if you have shelter, clothing, food, water, education, and healthcare provided for you, you're either going to spend the rest of your life eating Cheetos at your house while enjoying the latest holonovel, or you're going to do your darndest to be productive. If out of boredom if nothing else. This is probably why there are so many colonies, people who are tired of being pampered and want to show the universe something they built with their own two hands.

And others just like the idea of the freedom that cash/owning something gives you. Some use this to become rich, others do so for the challenge, others to improve via knowledge, etc. We're essentially talking Norway on steroids. While Quark's bar can't be fully automated(or at least he was too cheap to pay for quality Automated holograms), the bar at K-7 or Ten Forward could, and only had bartenders and waitresses for the pleasure of someone to talk to. And I'm sure most customers wanted to talk to a real Dabo girl, and not some holosuite character.

This actually makes sense in an automated world. Why do we go out, if all our needs are met? For social interaction. We see restaurants, bars, and other places do theme nights in the wake of food delivery and people staying at home. It's for the adventure of it, the new experience. Same way that Keiko is aghast at preparing a meal by hand, the Siskos in the same era make it a proud tradition. The only time we see a janitor anywhere is at Starfleet Academy, which is a necessary part of cadet discipline. The jobs are needed, but not to a large degree or unless you're in the frontier.

As for Jake and his baseball card, Jake probably didn't have an allowance, and wasn't a reporter yet. This is also the same kid who thought living in a place without a replicator for a week was 'roughing it'. I'm sure if Wesley wanted to buy his mom a present, and didn't want it to be replicated(note how Data and Worf are shopping for wedding gifts for Keiko and Miles in a replicator room in Data's Day), he'd have to work to get a little cash as well. Never underestimate the value of authenticity when it comes to the value of old junk.

So, it's likely that there are unpleasant jobs that pay well, but they're few and far between. And people like Keiko own a business because she wanted the adventure of being a freighter captain, and getting her own ship. Otherwise you do so that you don't feel like a lazy bag of bones relying on everyone else's charity and hard work.