Steven seemed fairly convincing to me that the Federation is, for most practical purposes, a military dictatorship, albeit a reasonably benevolent one.
Yeah. Much though I adore most of the varieties of _Star Trek_, I suspect that _Blake's 7_ is a more realistic depiction of how the Federation would actually operate.
Actually, now that I think on it, my skepticism here is probably even more deeply grounded in _Judge Dredd_. (The comics, that is, which are sometimes surprisingly deep social commentary.) One of the magnificently unsettling things about Mega-City One is that it posits many of the same assumptions: a mostly post-scarcity society, universal basic income, all that sort of thing, and the result is a fairly ghastly dystopia. Technically a police dictatorship rather than a military one per se, but that's basically splitting hairs.
I believe that inheritances are largely negative now, and would be completely so in a properly post-scarcity society.
There's a decent case to be made for that, but there's also (IMO) a decent amount of evidence that the desire for it is fairly hard-wired. People go to remarkable lengths to bend/break/change the rules in order to leave inheritances, so I suspect that a realistic system has to channel that somehow.
Well, according to people who have studied a lot more Marxism than I have, The New Deal was a desperate (and -- temporarily -- successful) patch to keep capitalism from self-destructing. Hence, it managed to, if you will, reset the clock from "late" to "middle". But since ~1980, as you know, that's been steadily eroding.
Honestly, I tend to find Marxists approximately as blinkered as I find Chicago School zealots. There's a strong streak of economics-as-religion in both cases, and it's easy to massage the evidence to fit any given religion. One of the reasons I like classical liberalism (neither the American definition of that word, nor the extremist corruption that is neo-liberalism) is that it tends to be pretty cool-eyed, evidence-based and nuanced -- not perfection, but at least possessing the right attitude.
Mind, I totally agree with "steadily eroding". I think there's a fine argument to be had between whether we should be trying to roll back more towards 1978 or 1995, but certainly since 2000 things have fallen off a cliff -- the plausible corrections that started under Reagan have been turned into absolute insanity. I just get frustrated with the tendency of the progressive wing to argue that the answer to right-wing extremism is left-wing extremism; that clearly colors my reaction here.
I don't forbid contracts per se, just contracts involving SUCs.
It's actually the forbidding contracts involving GCs that are the real problem here. In the model you're describing, GCs are approximately currency, and *could* be used for investment if the legal framework for that existed.
As far as private enterprise and investments, we don't seem to see much evidence in Trek of (non-government) investment or private enterprise existing. Certainly nothing on the size of Google, Boeing, General Motors, or Disney. There are reasonable arguments to be made that this is a negative quality of the Federation, but it is what we appear to see in the canon.
Fair -- I am, admittedly, spinning this in a slightly different direction than you intended, and thinking about what might work in practice, as opposed to how the Trek world might function...
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Date: 2020-05-11 06:35 pm (UTC)Yeah. Much though I adore most of the varieties of _Star Trek_, I suspect that _Blake's 7_ is a more realistic depiction of how the Federation would actually operate.
Actually, now that I think on it, my skepticism here is probably even more deeply grounded in _Judge Dredd_. (The comics, that is, which are sometimes surprisingly deep social commentary.) One of the magnificently unsettling things about Mega-City One is that it posits many of the same assumptions: a mostly post-scarcity society, universal basic income, all that sort of thing, and the result is a fairly ghastly dystopia. Technically a police dictatorship rather than a military one per se, but that's basically splitting hairs.
There's a decent case to be made for that, but there's also (IMO) a decent amount of evidence that the desire for it is fairly hard-wired. People go to remarkable lengths to bend/break/change the rules in order to leave inheritances, so I suspect that a realistic system has to channel that somehow.
Honestly, I tend to find Marxists approximately as blinkered as I find Chicago School zealots. There's a strong streak of economics-as-religion in both cases, and it's easy to massage the evidence to fit any given religion. One of the reasons I like classical liberalism (neither the American definition of that word, nor the extremist corruption that is neo-liberalism) is that it tends to be pretty cool-eyed, evidence-based and nuanced -- not perfection, but at least possessing the right attitude.
Mind, I totally agree with "steadily eroding". I think there's a fine argument to be had between whether we should be trying to roll back more towards 1978 or 1995, but certainly since 2000 things have fallen off a cliff -- the plausible corrections that started under Reagan have been turned into absolute insanity. I just get frustrated with the tendency of the progressive wing to argue that the answer to right-wing extremism is left-wing extremism; that clearly colors my reaction here.
It's actually the forbidding contracts involving GCs that are the real problem here. In the model you're describing, GCs are approximately currency, and *could* be used for investment if the legal framework for that existed.
Fair -- I am, admittedly, spinning this in a slightly different direction than you intended, and thinking about what might work in practice, as opposed to how the Trek world might function...