Star Trek

Topic: Barter Economy
(I also put this on the ENT board & I also thought it would be good here too)

Do you think a Barter economy will become reality in the future?

My self personally I don’t see it happening that easy. Companies, businesses, entrepreneurs, and regular people giving money up. I don’t completely know why Gene Roddenberry wants this kind of economy.

I think the negatives would be supplying wants & needs. If we look at economics & the general study of it would not a barter economy hinder the exchange of good & services because the products some people have to offer are not always acceptable or easy to divide for payment. Would not people slack off because they really don’t have to work for money and government involvement I think would me impossible to avoid.

I could be misunderstand some things if I am please clear it up for me.

And does a barter economy all ready exist in ENT?

Master Q
MY E-MAIL ADDRESS: StarTrek_MasterQ@yahoo.com

but even in a barter economy you substitute in some thing for currency, like latinum

I don’t see a barter economy actually working, there would just be too many problems with it, mainly that what you have might not be what the other person wants.

As for the people slacking off, Roddenberry envisions a future where most people don’t just look out for themselves but care about everyone else, so I guess everyone would do whatever they were good at to help out. I personally don’t see this type of selflessness from humans any time soon, but you never know.

I don’t believe that a barter system will ever exist in the future because of the problems of a barter system. The barter system exist in Star Trek pretty much because it is an idealized marxist society that would never be able to happen in reality. Perhaps barter would exist between alien civilizations as trade but even that is doubtful because of the great distance between the two civilizations and time it would take to get from one of the alien civilization to the other. Would you really make trade with someone that takes hundreds of years to ever actually set up then another few hundred years to actually recieve? So the barter economy won’t become the dominant economy in the future.

Barter economies do exist, they have worked before, and they will work again. The only hitch, you’re right, is services. But if you think about it, really, what kind of services do we have that we can’t do ourselves? We could all fix our own cars, homeschool, build our own houses, whatever if we wanted to. Getting paid for a job would be totally different. If you eliminate currency and serivces like that, you narrow the job market down to retail and government. Getting "paid" for retail is easy. You barter to get what you need, and that’s how you get paid. Government is a little harder. It seems kind of commiunist to just totally provide for all government workers, but who knows. Government would again be restricted to The President, Congress, and Courts.

And besides, have you ever been to Mexico or somewhere they do this? It’s fun to barter.

Well, not having what someone wants is a probelm in this system, too. If you go to "Wal-Mart" looking to buy a car, you’re not going to get very far. So, you go somewhere else. This isn’t a system where you have one store for everything. It’s diverse, anywhere you go. One guy sells food, another sells computers, clothing is across the street, etc.

No, the whole point of a barter economy is that there is no currency. You trade direct, goods for goods.

I’m not sure we’re all understanding what’s meant by "barter." Bartering is not the same as dickering, as you would do in a Turkish bazaar to settle on a price (or as smart consumers do when buying a car anyplace but at Saturn). There, the payment is still usually in money. Bartering is where I make shoes for a living, and I want a hamburger, so I have to go find someone who has hamburgers he wants to trade for a pair of shoes. If he’s happy with the shoes on his feet I keep looking. If he wants shoes but all he has to trade is wristwatches, HE keeps looking. Also, when suitable trade partners find one another, there’s the somewhat complicated issue of settling how many hamburgers equal the value of one pair of shoes, especially if the two commodities don’t divide evenly (what if pair of shoes is worth 2.5 wristwatches -- do I have to wait till the wristwatch guy wants two pairs, and then trade them for 5 wristwatches? What if the ratio was 2.3?).

You may be thinking, can’t we find alternatives? Surely I must have something other than shoes to trade, maybe some of the extra wristwatches I got last week? Yes, but every transaction involves comparing inventories. You might think that with computers this might be done quickly, but remember that the parties might not want each other to know what they have in inventory. For instance, if he realizes I have a whole lot of something that’s hard to store or whose value depreciates rapidly, he’ll know he won’t have to trade goods of much value for it because of my need to unload.

Or, of course, I could figure out how to make my own hamburgers. Yes, but giving up commerce altogether means losing a lot of benefits. Does the hamburger guy make his own shoes? When he makes only one pair a year, will his be as good as mine, when I make a pair every day? Will my hamburgers be as good as his? This alternative leaves him wearing lousy shoes and me eating lousy hamburgers because we can’t deal.

Barter sucks. You have to keep all kinds of property on hand just because someone with something you need might want to get it in trade. If your inventory doesn’t include what he happens to want you’re unable to deal. Every transaction has to be negotiated separately to figure out what the current rate of exchange should be between these two parties for these two commodities. Barter impedes commerce and the creation of wealth, thereby keeping large numbers people in poverty -- or it would, as it once did, except that everyone in the world (with the possible exception of the writers of Star Trek) has caught on to the value of using a common medium of exchange, known as money.

Of course, in trading with aliens you’ve never seen before and don’t expect to see again (as Voyager often had to), you’d have no alternative to barter. How the economy of the Federation worked was never explained very clearly, which may be just as well ...