Reviewer: Cowgirlcadet1701 Signed [Report This]
Date: 23 May 2013 16:54 Title: Entire Essay

"A hole in Star Trek's universe has always been: who cleans? They don't have robots, they don't have janitors"

I beg to differ on that. They DO have janitors. In the beginning of TWOK, just after the Kobayashi Maru scene, as Kirk and Spock are walking down the hall, we clearly see a guy with a vacuum cleaner. Looks like a janitor to me.

Reviewer: Nerys Ghemor Signed [Report This]
Date: 21 Feb 2009 04:38 Title: Entire Essay

Interesting speculations...but I think your essay could be even stronger if you addressed some cynic's objections directly.  Here are some examples:

One question that comes to mind is this: if everyone does jobs they love, then what about the jobs that no one loves?  Who does those?  Would you think there'd be some sort of forced rotation in and out of those jobs?  (Consider, for instance, the way the society of Anares is portrayed in Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed...)

The other thing I still see no solution to is the subject of mooching.  What about people like Bashir's father who seem to have difficulty making a sustained contribution to society (i.e. can't hold down a job)?  Would they, in your system, be restricted only to receiving the basics?  Or do they receive exactly what every other Federation citizen does?  And if those who do not work DO receive in line with anybody else--then what is the incentive for anybody else to work?  There would certainly be a minority that would work for love of the job, but I frankly do not believe that human nature is such that enough people would work if there were not a concrete reason to do so.

Another thing--if corporations are abolished, must we then assume that all enterprises that run on a scale larger than any person or small partnership can manage are government-run?  What prevents government abuse with this massive amount of resources and power?  Furthermore, without competition, where does the incentive for innovation come from, and what purges inefficiency from the system?  Is it solely competition against external powers (to include competition with the Ferengi, and cold wars with other powers at various times, before those wars went hot?), or is there some sort of domestic mechanism that ensures competition and the purging of inefficiencies, without it all being under strict government mandates that could easily be abused?

(Oh, and one small nitpick about the Ferengi: the Grand Exchequer is in fact their main deity.  The Grand Nagus is the lead political/financial authority in their government.)

Author's Response: Yes, I probably should write a follow-up essay dealing with issues like these. I do tend to think that the Federation *can* be quite dark, and that any utopian "solution" to a problem may come with its own detriments, so I agree that there would be problems that need to be solved. Recently I've put more thought into it and decided that there actually are different levels of "pay", or rather credits (credits actually being a unit of energy used in replicator usage, or holodeck usage, although in the TOS era they had a much closer relationship to money), given to people who are not in private business, based on factors like how distasteful the job is and how hard it is, and that's part of the motivation to get people who pick up trash. :-) But yeah, there's very little large private enterprise, and a lot of the competition comes from intangibles which create problems of their own (successful inventors get renown and respect, but this can make people just a little bit psycho about pushing their own inventions vs. other people's. :-)) And what prevents government abuse? Who says *anything* does? As near as I can see in the Trek universe everything's run by the government and if you're not happy with that... you get a ship and you run off to outer space. :-) I think many independent traders and the like are in fact rejecting an overly intrusive government.