Spoilers Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

[trappedslider]

This is one of those things that you can slightly blame Gene

Ronald D. Moore commented, "By the time I joined TNG, Gene had decreed that money most emphatically did NOT exist in the Federation, nor did 'credits' and that was that. Personally, I've always felt this was a bunch of hooey, but it was one of the rules and that's that." (AOL chat, 1997)

 

[payn]

We don’t get a ton of time with Earth in Star Trek. Most of it is ships out in space on the frontier. Though DS9 has the talked about here segment.

I took the credits thing as more of a way to manage beam travel on a planet of billions of people. That’s gotta be a lot of traffic. Hard to know who is going where with what. So the credit system wasn’t so much money, it was more about just getting to schedule travel in general.

 

[MarkB]

It also makes me wonder about Federation citizens who don’t work for Starfleet. So Kasidy is a freighter captain - does she work for herself or for the Federation? Does she own her own ship? Does she profit from goods sold? I get the impression not - she feels more like an airline pilot than anything else, she has a set duty rota and can take vacation.

My impression of Kasidy is that she owns her own ship and hires her crew, but generally doesn't buy or sell goods, instead taking on contract work to ship peoples' goods at an agreed price - essentially a courier for hire. She takes jobs for non-Federation clients, including Bajorans, so is presumably paid in latinum or some other exchangeable currency.

She does seem to be a Federation citizen herself, though, which does leave the question of how one comes to own a vessel in the Federation (or a vineyard, for that matter).