> Does anyone here ever think about alternative economic systems similar to getting rid of money, like what the Federation does on Star Trek?
They still need a way to (efficiently) distribute resources.
Sure, everyone gets a replicator for basic things but what about scarce resources like spaceships? Do you just pop over to the Bureau of Spacecraft Allocation and declare you want a ship to tool around the sector in?
I was wondering this too. I remember a quote from the Westworld HBO series: "what is real? that which is irreplaceable."
One of the main problems with our current capitalist economic system is that the way it values things doesn't distinguish between commodities like food/energy, things that are difficult to replace like homes/vehicles, and things that are priceless like human lives/the environment. So we waste time talking about the minor monetary cost of feeding the poor while completely ignoring the incalculable price of letting them continue to starve.
Since a spaceship approaches real by being nearly irreplaceable, under UBI it would have a nonlinear value higher than its components. I imagine on Star Trek that some portion of the individual per diem is set aside in a communal fund, and everyone votes on how much of that fund should be allocated to things like spaceships.
I would think that any part of a smaller spaceship like a shuttlecraft that can be replicated (only requiring energy or readily available raw materials) is provided to hobbyists and even children for essentially free. But stuff that's hard to come by like duranium or tritanium might cost credits. Latinum (having no obvious use) might be their equivalent of Bitcoin, but I digress:
They still need a way to (efficiently) distribute resources.
Sure, everyone gets a replicator for basic things but what about scarce resources like spaceships? Do you just pop over to the Bureau of Spacecraft Allocation and declare you want a ship to tool around the sector in?