Walk out into the wilderness and make it on your own out there, tell me how much manpower you have to spend keeping your core temperature above 90F. It takes a lot of effort keeping a human alive; by yourself you just can’t afford things like electricity, sewage treatment and antibiotics. We only have those things because of the economies of scale that society allows.

Yeah, capitalism is a bit out of control at the moment, but…let’s kill all the billionaires, kill their families, kill their heirs, kill the stockholders. Let me pull on my swastika and my toothbrush mustache for a minute and go full on Auschwitz on “greedy people.” That the Musks and Gateses and Buffets of the world must be genetically greedy, so we must genocide that out of the population. And we get it done. Every CEO, every heiress, every reality TV producer, every lobbyist, every inside trader in congress, every warden of a for-profit prison, dead to the last fetus.

Now what?

You want to live in a house? Okay. At some point someone built that house. Someone walked out into a forest and cut down the trees that made the boards. And/or dug the clay that made the bricks or whatever. Somebody mined the iron ore that someone else smelted into large gauge wire that someone else made into nails that someone else pounded into the boards to hold them together.

We’re still in the 21st century, there are people on this planet lighting their homes with kerosene lanterns. We still have coal miners, fishermen and loggers. Farming has always been a difficult, miserable thing to do, we’ve just mechanized it to the point that it’s difficult and miserable on a relatively small number of people. Those people probably aren’t going to keep farming at industrial scale for the fun of it.

Star Trek, especially in the TNG era, shows us a very optimistic idea of what life would be like if we had not only nuclear fission power, not only nuclear fusion power, but antimatter power. The technology to travel faster than the speed of light and an energy source capable of fueling it, plus such marvels as the food replicator and matter transporter. The United Federation of Planets is a post-scarcity society. We aren’t. Somewhere on this planet right now is a man hosing blended human shit off of an impeller in a stopped sewage treatment plant so he can replace the leaking shaft seal. We use a man with a hose for this because it’s the best technology we have for the job. We do the job at all because if we don’t, it’ll cause a few million cases of cholera. Who do you think should pay for the hose that guy is using?

Star Trek also operates in a non-scarcity environment and eliminates the necessity of hard, pretty non-rewarding labor through either not showing it or writing (like putting holograms into mines instead of people, or using some sci-fi tech that makes mining comfy as long as said tech doesn’t kill you).

Even without capitalism the term “life is expensive” still stands not in regards to money, but effort that has to be put into stuff that doesn’t wield any emotional reward (you can feel emotionally rewarded in many ways, but some stuff is just shit for a long time). Every person who suffered through depression is gonna tell you that, to feel enticed to do something, there has to be some emotional reward connected to it (one of the things depression elimates), and it’s a mathematical fact that not everyone who’d start scrubbing tubes on a starship could eventually get into high positions since there simply aren’t that many of those. The emotional gains have to offset the cost you put into it.

Of course cutthroat capitalism is shit and I love Star Trek, but what it shows doesn’t make too much sense either economically or socially.