"You're obsessed with freedom, Leo. It's an old genetic echo of the culture you came from. For hundreds of years, your ancestors chased happiness, individuality, and self-determination. And where did it get them? A mountain of unpayable debt, a lonely population staring at screens, and a society that hated its own neighbors"

"They financialized human existence to the cellular level, driven by an insatiable need to extract a margin of profit from every conceivable human action. Every breath, every step, every fleeting thought was quantified, commodified, and taxed. They replaced social safety nets with high-interest credit and turned citizens into pure, data-mined economic assets. They pulled consumption from the future to pay for the present, letting debt flow endlessly so their corporate empires could out-produce the other civilizations. They turned survival into a brutal, high-stakes game of market Darwinism, running the population on infinite dopamine loops and hyper-customized consumerism just to keep the GDP from cratering"

"They thought extreme markets would make them strong enough to fight off the outer world. Instead, it hollowed them out from within."

If you like cozy-but-dystopian cages, perfect humanoid companions, and industrial civilizations hollowing out humanity, consider checking out my dystopian sci-fi novel.

Star Trek was overly idealistic. And in truth, it wasn't really until Gene Roddenberry's death that we had any idea HOW the politics and economy of The United Federation of Planets works.

If anyone remembers the episode Justice of TNG, the planet of Rubicun III. It's the episode where Wesley nearly had capital punishment on the paradise sex world.

This was meant to be Earth. He was thankfully talked into it.

Later episodes do reveal how the economy of The Federation operates, and it's a liberal democracy. There are strong personal freedoms, and strong property rights. You might ask, how can there be strong property rights in a communist state? It's not communist.

After the first warp test ship was created, and after First Contact, Mankind just... decided to work together. It seems like early rebuilt civilizations had a gift economy. This was probably pretty easy, (relatively), to pull off, with the Vulcans promising technological development to anyone that joined the zeitgeist.

Vulcans, for the record, have a bureaucratic technocracy. Like Equilibrium, this only works because they are emotionless zombies. Vulcans still have marriages arranged by their families. Only emotionally unstable Vulcans seem to have a problem with it.

After the gift economy allowed society to rebuild, society got to the point where much production was entirely automated.

One of the (many) problems with communism is that:

Who has to work in the factories?

Who has to work themselves to death in the mines?

Well, in Star Trek, Earth got to the point it didn't have to worry about it. Instead, it put it's effort on something completely different.

For the record, other than First Contact, Star Trek and Judge Dredd both have identical backstories. The difference is that Star Trek values your need for fulfillment. It understands your need to contribute in a way most optimal with your character and abilities.

It's a worth that takes the first officer of the most blinged out Capital ship, and values his Trombone abilities equally to his duties as Command and XO of the Enterprise.

Sure, by TNG, they can have a replimat, where you can sit and eat, but this is only necessary if you actually feel like going out. It purposefully creates a Third Place. If you want to open a pub, they will help you. If you want to create a sport arena, they will provide you the necessary space and administrative support.

Do you want a 40 storey building dedicated to painting your warcrack? As long as it's built in an area with enough demand.

Of course, this is entirely theoretical until we can reach post-scarcity economy. The only thing we can take from it is unfortunately the French idea of ennui.

Le sigh.

*exhales his cigarette*

What exactly am I supposed to spend money on?

I live in one of the garden habs in Earth's L2 swarm. My basic income from the city has always covered my real needs and left me with enough to buy drinks and go to the occasional show. The robots do almost all the work anyway, so pretty much all the stuff I could ever want is basically free.

So when I took a job at a new company a few years ago, I agreed to take my pay in shares. I mean why not? Well the boss did something right, or maybe wrong, and our little company got bought. My share's pretty big. Like over a decade's worth of my stipend big.

So what exactly am I supposed to spend it on? My old boss says I should invest it, but that just kicks the problem down the road. I feel like it's this weird lump of money that's either going to swell until it bursts or just start leaking all over the place.

- good problems

Well you could hire an advice columnist to solve your personal problems for you.

I assume you already know the traditional answers to your question, but I'll go over them anyway. Money's mostly for things that are rare or limited. We're living in what used to get called a post scarcity society, but there are always going to some things that are scarce.

So in general, there's: Paying actual people to do things for you. Buying original artwork. Buying a licensed copy of a work still under copyright. Buying tickets to live performances. Booking passage for physical travel somewhere outside of your community's normal commuting range. Buying or renting more living space, or a living space in a premium location. Buying any physical goods that aren't part of your community's normal trade.

And then you can get into things like donating to causes or funding research.

Really there's no upper limit to how much money you can spend once you get in the habit of buying more than your daily bread.