I’m glad there is no money in the Federation. Unless you count credits. Which are not money. Unless you use thousands of them to pay the Barzans. Or give them to Starfleet officers to buy things like tribbles and drinks at Quark’s.
I’m glad there is no money in the Federation. Unless you count credits. Which are not money. Unless you use thousands of them to pay the Barzans. Or give them to Starfleet officers to buy things like tribbles and drinks at Quark’s.
If it has no value inside the Federation, why would it have value outside the Federation? That makes no sense. Why would you negotiate to give a certain amount of credits to the Barzans in that case? Why not seventeen trillion? Why not a googol plex amount of credits? You can always “print” more credits since they have no internal value, right?
I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. The Federation is post-scarcity. They don’t need to worry about how much things cost inside their economic bubble.
Just because Federation citizens don’t need to think about money and buying things as part of their daily lives, that doesn’t mean things have no price. For federation citizens, that price means nothing and they’d likely never even see it. For a Ferengi buying something like replacement parts at a Federation station though, that price matters.
When you’re dealing with other cultures that do work with a monetary system, they have a monetary value for things. If you’re going to interact and buy/sell items back and forth you need to have some sort of system to facilitate that. So the Federation has a standard credit, and items are worth various amounts so the cost can be directly exchanged like we do currently comparing different currencies. That credit just doesn’t really matter to Federation citizens that don’t interact outside the Federation, which is likely the nearly all of them given the size of the Federation.
We only see it referenced several times because we’re watching Starships that interact with all these different cultures daily. We aren’t watching Mr. Wilson who lives on Earth and has never left Federation space. While he does travel, he goes to Risa for vacation, and that is inside the Federation still. So his daily work, recreation, and even vacation doesn’t involve needing any money.
But why would other cultures accept those credits if the citizens of the Federation consider them valueless? What good are they to those cultures?
I imagine they have value because they can be used to buy things from the federation itself.
It’s the same for any currency. Voyager had to barter for goods since credits don’t mean anything in the delta quadrant, but that is less convenient for both parties than a standard currency.
I like to imagine federation credits as something like Euros. If you live in the US, you don’t use Euros. You could go your whole life without using them. But if you travel you need them. If you are a government or military personnel you need them. You could say, “We don’t use Euros in the US.” In the same way Picard says " The federation doesn’t use money."
Some citizens in the US trade Euros. Some Federation members would trade Federation credits. But in general Federation citizens wouldn’t use Federation credits to pay for goods and services.