My friends are mostly Star Wars fans, and they assault me endlessly (but in a good-natured way) about the alleged "socialism" in Star Trek. In Star Trek, nobody seems to be motivated by greed or tries to get rich (well, the villains sometimes do, but not the Federation personnel themselves). This is taken to be proof of some kind of shambling socialist conformity in action - "It's like the USSR and the UN rolled together" is one comment I hear fairly often.
But I think that's a pretty fundamental error. The point of Star Trek is that certain enabling technologies (specifically, more or less free energy and replicators) have completely transformed societies and economics to the point that labels like "capitalist" or "socialist" don't apply at all. Star Trek isn't a socialist nightmare; it's a libertarian dream. When you no longer have to sell your labor to sustain yourself, you're free to do whatever you want, and the real value lies in the act of creation, not the act of production.
I suppose greed still exists in Star Trek, but when the replicator can give you practically any material good you could ever want, I'm not sure what the point of greed would be. It isn't that everyone has the same amount of stuff; it's that everyone can have everything, so in the end "mere stuff" no longer matters. What matters is the mind, the act of creating something new.
You want a gold goblet to drink Romulan ale out of? You presumably tell the replicator what you want, it it synthesizes it on the spot. But the replicator can't synthesize new works of art, new scientific discoveries, new technical approaches, new theories, new music. It can only reproduce what has already been made. So the value, the point, lies in creating, not having. The mind becomes the defining quality of a person - you're important not for what you have, or what you can produce in a material sense, but for what you know, what you can figure out, what you can create. I like that.
"I wouldn't want to live in that system," my friends say. "There'd be no ambition, no drive, no spiritus, no reason to strive; it'd be nothing but a bunch of couch potatoes eating bon-bons from the replicator and watching crap on what passes for TV in the future."
And I admit that the possibility exists that within the Federation, a large segment of the population sits around eating junk out of the replicator and doing nothing. But maybe they eventually get bored with doing nothing and decide to create something new. Or maybe the ambition to amass material possessions has been transformed into the ambition to be recognized as the most surpassingly important mind in whatever field of endeavor interests you. Maybe you like to design phasers. And maybe being recognized as the best phaser designer in known space is what gets you out of bed in the morning.
"But that just leads to a society of snobby intellectual elites!"
I'd rather have a society of snobby intellectual elites than a society of snobby materialistic elites, but I guess that's the difference between me and them. Though it does amuse that whenever a "noted scientist" is the episode's antagonist, he (usually it's a he, but not always) is almost always a complete asshole - they may celebrate the mind, but nobody likes a smug scientist.
Not that I have anything against Star Wars. They're fun movies (most of them, anyway), and the pulp fiction starkness of the black-versus-white moral issue allows one to watch the movies without being assaulted by moral ambiguities. But there aspects of the underpinnings of Star Wars that don't resonate with me very much. Royalty, for one. I don't have any problem with ceremonial heads of state, even hereditary ceremonial heads of state, in the manner of the United Kingdom. But I'm not too keen on the idea of someone being entitled to power and privilege simply by virtue of birth - I'd want to know what their qualifications for being in control of my life happen to be, and I don't accept "Because my daddy was king" as good enough.
There are, it must be admitted, certain things about Star Trek that rub me the wrong way. The show sometimes descends to almost hysterical moralizing. One of the episodes in Next Generation that particularly galled me was the one where they found the disconnected Borg, named him Hugh, and contemplated using him as a means of introducing a computer virus into the Borg collective that would essentially eliminate them. But no, Doctor Crusher goes off on some great crusade about how they can't just arbitrarily wipe out an entire species, using the "we'd be no better than them if it we did" argument. Does that mean that when a man destroys a nest of wasps on his doorstep that he's no better than the wasps? Maybe so - but it beats being stung every time you go out to check the mail.
What's next? We can't throw away rotten food because even rotten food has a right to be eaten? I don't think so. At some point people have to think about the matter and decide that it's either us or the Borg, period, and all the hand-wringing won't slow the Borg down by so much as a millisecond when they come to assimilate Earth. Starfleet Medical wouldn't hesitate to wipe out a dangerous virus that causes some serious disease, after all.
But what the heck. It's all in fun, and it isn't like it's really important, like whether I should have a salad or a sandwich for lunch.
Speaking of which...
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