> Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership.

The idea that Star Trek "very clearly" describes anything about the economy of the Federation (or even that what it does show of that economy is remotely consistent) is somewhat amusing. Most of the civilian economy it shows clearly is outside of the Federation (and mostly varieties of regulated market economies), and most of what it shows of the Federation is focussed on a quasi-military service, not the civilian economy.

I'd say the strongest indication is that the Federation civilian economy is largely a gift and informal, non-money-mediated barter/market economy where there scarce items are personal services more than material goods.

absolutely none of the economic concerns in Star Trek are described with any clarity. the level of ambiguity is so consistent and so cultivated that it seems to be an editorial feature of the series: do not disambiguate how the Federation's economy really works.

At minimum it is clearly not a command economy. Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan. Production priorities are not driven by a central planning committee. There is a private sector.

What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to. This lack of scarcity for basic essentials (food, for example) means that their economy is concerned with very different things than ours is. I see very little evidence that it's a command economy of any kind though.

It is stated (in DS9 if memory serves) that replicators have met material needs, so people work simply to discover and better themselves.

I think the show is clear, but not very explicit. They don't beat people over the head with this stuff because it's boring to most people.

So, a few thoughts. I think one primer for Star Trek economics is S1E25. Offenhouse, just out of cryonic sleep, really wants to get things rolling and demands to talk to the captain. To demonstrate his seriousness he points out to Riker that the compound interest on his accounts is probably enough to buy the Enterprise. If his accounts are legally intact, they would certainly represent an astronomical amount of wealth worthy of respect, but Riker treats this as the goofiest thing anyone has said to him all week and blatantly blows him off.

Later on, the captain completely fails to take his demands to talk to his lawyer about his property seriously. Later still, "material needs no longer exist." It's a little unclear whether it's even possible in the present for someone on Earth to be a tycoon the way Offenhouse used to be, but I'm pretty sure none exist on TNG. (am I forgetting anybody?)

There are certainly tycoons and accumulators of wealth away from Earth in the greater Star Trek universe, but they tend to be portrayed as buffoonish (Ferengi) or blatantly evil (Kivas Fajo) and they serve as a contrast to the Federation's way of doing things.

> Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan.

I think we should probably infer that social standing and power follow from participation in the Federation, since it seems to usually work that way. When Picard comes back to Earth in S4E2, there's a fairly prominent civilian job (run by the government) lined up for him. Successful scientists, successful anything, always seem to have Federation ties. (the only counterexample I could think of offhand was the evil scientist who built Data)

There's a question of POV here - maybe there's some whole other, much more capitalistic, economy in the Federation that just isn't shown on screen. I don't think so.

> What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to

One of the things that Iain Banks describes really well in the Culture novels is how, in a post-scarcity economy, controlling the replicators (or whatever) means having power. With regard to Star Trek, I just can't think of any examples offhand of serious resource allocation happening on Earth or within the Federation based on a capitalist process of price discovery. It seems like the entrepreneurs have to get out to the frontier.

That depends. Much of "the government" of trek seems to be handled by the military or at least military leaders. That is no doubt a product of the need to involve the known characters, but we do see little to nothing of elected officials. Some characters (spock) bounce seemlessly between military and what we would today call civilian jobs (ambassadors). The military and its meritocracy, as oppossed to civilian democracy, is at the heart of trek government.

That is probably a statement about US cold war politics, but i think matters today given the new cabinate being enshrined today.

Deep Space 9 has an arc where a Starfleet officer attempts to launch a coup against the (elected) President of the Federation - we do see an elected leader there, but you're right that it isn't spelled out in much detail.

But is that elected leader elected by people or by representatives? This is where trek and wars meet. They both have a federal approach parralleling the US sennate, reps from individual planets rather than according to population. And the leader is elected by the sennate. So this isnt a government for people and thier rights, but a government of governments more akin to a United Nations with a navy. So there could be a nazi planet and a libertarian planet as how planets govern themselves is irrelevant. Individuals do not have rights under the federal government but through whatever planet they happen to be upon.

There are links to japanese fuedal system, which has a place in the US system whereby the federal government is allocated its own lands apart from the states. "The empire" would be as if washington DC and the US president started annexing state lands.

The other commentor is right. It doesn't even remotely describe the workings of the economy, especially at the galactic scale. Why do Ferengi care so much about latinum? They still have access to replicators. Episodes frequently involve exchange of goods at variable prices, obviously blowing the command economy idea out of the water.

from memory (so possibly mistaken) latinum is both rare and impossible to replicate (for unexplained reasons). it is suitable for use as currency for those reasons.

the Ferengi trade extensively with other civilizations that won't accept fiat currency. they need hard currency.

One wonders why the Federation never told the Ferengi about the only currency ever successfully used on Earth after the invention of replicators, Dogecoin.

I choose to retcon latinum as a device that physically encodes a cryptographic key, writes a signed hash into a subspace blockchain, and continually supplies computation power to the latinum validation network. It may look pretty, but it is actually a sophisticated ASIC that runs entirely on ambient photovoltaic energy.

So you can replicate latinum, but in order for it to be worth anything, you have to possess a specific bar that the network has designated to be split, or you have to replicate more than all the other latinum already in existence, to perform a 51% attack on the network.

You don't need to retcon latinum when you basically described how the Borg work. Assimilation is just adding people to their mining pool.