Lessons From Star Trek or What is Good for Business?by
Dmitry Chernikov In one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 Captain Sisko describes Earth as "paradise." It is a paradise in which there is no such thing as money, and people don’t get paid for doing things. In the same episode we see Sisko’s father’s restaurant, but the workings of his business remain mysterious. The problem is that without the price system and money serving as a unit of account it is impossible to rationally allocate resources and capital goods in particular to their most valued uses. It becomes impossible to calculate profit and loss and therefore run any business, unless the Trek replication technology has done away with the scarcity of most of the goods. But even then, labor, land, energy sources, the replicators themselves, which, I assume, differ in capacity and power (you can’t replicate a spaceship on the DS9 machines), and who knows what else still remain scarce. And it is a reasonable guess that in the restaurant the food is cooked rather than replicated, unless the replicators also come in different qualities, and high-quality boxes are unavailable to the average man. Further, unless his food is priced, it must be rationed, and Sisko’s old man must decide which "customer" gets what and how much, lest some guy simply walks into the kitchen with a big bag and takes everything that was prepared for the day (for what could stop him?). The puzzles multiply without end, e.g., what determines the size of the business? Did the owner have to petition the government for cooks and replicators and equipment and the property itself? Then there is the incentives problem. Maybe Sisko’s dad likes to cook and make people happy. But somehow I suspect that such works of charity will be utterly exhausting if performed day in and day out. And what about his dishwasher? Does he, too, experience no disutility of labor? At any rate, mass production cannot be based on charity but only on self-interest. Similarly, we never see Quark, who owns a bar on the space station, get paid for dispensing his drinks; at least, I don’t recall ever seeing that. For a guy obsessed with latinum (now there’s your sound money – latinum-standard; and in another episode we learn that gold is worthless compared to latinum) this is a problem, especially given that the Federation military employees on the station don’t receive any wages. Once again, the necessary obscurity of how Quark’s business worked (because it obviously cannot work) seemed rather annoying. So the difficulties remain. In another episode Nog needs to acquire a part for the Defiant (apparently, that, too, could not be replicated), and, rather than simply buying the part with non-existent money on the non-existent market from the non-existent private supplier working in the spacecraft industry (picture "Spacezone" or "Toyota Space"), engages in a ridiculous series of barter trades. No matter how well-concealed the Star Trek economy is from the viewers, sometimes the silliness of the setup shines through. Further, the variety of goods and services available on DS9 is extremely limited. The personnel seem to be, as one, ascetic workaholics. I’ve never seen any character go shopping. I suppose these guys are supplied with government-made standard-issue everything. Not a lot of fun. It is also peculiar, and telling, in a science fiction show, that we never see any non-government scientists. All space-related and medical scientific work is apparently done within Starfleet. Not once do we see a private person owning a "runabout" or a starship. The only exception to this rule may be Sisko’s girlfriend Kasidy Yates who operated a merchant ship. But then DS9 was the most interesting and fun of all the Star Trek shows and by the end seemed to relax its totalitarian moorings (I’ve only seen TNG, DS9 and Voyager, the last of which I stopped watching quickly both because it was so atrocious and as a result, I suppose, of growing up.) Two more pieces of evidence: first, there appears to be no interspecies division of labor. The humans, the Cardassians, the Romulans are isolated from each other economically. Second, monolithic world governments and empires that rule vast expanses of space are standard. Suppose that the Bajorans entered the Federation. Would they want to be told what to do by some Federation bureaucrat a million light years away? It might seem that the "Prime Directive" will prevent interference, but (1) the directive itself is absurd, because it outlaws free association, and (2) it says nothing about the political system of the Federation. And, similarly, would a Bajoran farmer want to be told what to plant and what not to plant by the Bajoran state even a thousand miles away? I understand that the show needs to simplify things to stay compelling. The Klingons are warriors, the Cardassians are cruel militarists, etc. But this at the expense of a believable society. Finally, all traces of religion in the Trek universe, with one exception, are absent, most likely because of the perfectly crude view that "science" wars with "religion" and that by the 24th century, surely, science will have progressed so much as to destroy religion completely. The exception, the Bajorans’ "prophets," too, was in DS9, a half-hearted attempt to make a sterile world more complex. (Even here, the Bajorans were less developed and therefore less "rational" than the Federation bureaucrats, so faith was OK for them.) When the show did venture into theology, the results were not encouraging. Q, for instance, is nothing at all like God. God does not toy with people for amusement. In one Voyager episode it was shown that Q’s race was bored to death and therefore one Q commits suicide. (This is similar to the plot of Scott Adams’s God’s Debris, in which the only thing an omniscient God does not know and wants to find out is whether he can put himself back together after blowing himself up into the universe.) I’ve dealt with such ideas earlier. Nor is Q infinite, one, necessary, loving, etc. Seven of Nine’s idea of perfection is some kind of molecule – crazy! (She wants perfection? How about a cube? It’s nice and symmetrical; just try to find any flaw in that.) Neelix’s "Great Forest" of his concept of the afterlife turns out to be non-existent. Not even natural happiness after death is tolerated in Voyager. (Contrast with how well this was exploited in Gladiator.) The beliefs about the next life of the Vhnori people are shown to be equally unfounded. These despite that it is, of course, impossible today to use personal non-accounts as evidence against the immortality of the soul, given all the research into near-death experiences. And in the movie ST: Generations the happiness of the Nexus turns out to be the happiness of playing a computer game: an illusion. Some "heaven" that is. It seems beyond doubt that the economic system of the Trek Federation is socialism of some variant, which, oddly enough, has resulted not in social suicide but in unprecedented, if not clearly shown to the viewers, prosperity. Maybe the creators still feel that socialism is "inevitable," that you "can’t turn back the clock," but that its emergence may have to, unfortunately, be postponed until the 24th century. Superstitious nonsense, all of it. History is made by human actions and choices which emanate from humans themselves, not by any external "forces" acting on human beings that cleverly and ineluctably guide them toward a predestined outcome. And even if there were such forces (grace, perhaps? but even it requires cooperation), they sure wouldn’t lead us to communism. Look, when we are in heaven, united with God within the communion of saints, contemplating His essence as spirits, then we won’t need private property or the stock market. Until that happens, we are bound to this world and its economic realities. (Another, unrelated, oddity of the Trek universe, is personal relations, I hesitate to call them sexual or romantic or marital, because this sort of thing was absurdly awkward on the show anyway, possibly because of the Stakhanovite and repressed nature of the Trek socialist men and women, between the members of different races. I mean, Commander Data and what’s-her-name? Come on, is this hunk of junk an orgasmotron of some kind? Odo and a human girl? The guy is a blob of goo! I am sure that he, being an intellectual creature, can love, but a "passionate night"? Wouldn’t he lack the physical organs and the psychic prerequisites to engage in sex? And don’t tell me Odo could shapeshift. The guy couldn’t even get his face right. Making the highly complex external and internal organs would be far beyond his capabilities. Who do these writers think we are? (Nerds?)) OK, enough of the fun. In the newer Star Trek the race of Ferengi (of whom Quark is one) represents the despicable and unreconstructed businessmen and entrepreneurs, as contrasted with the vague and seemingly unchanging Federation utopia. I now bring your attention to their comical "rules of acquisition" which include #34: "War is good for business." and #35: "Peace is good for business." (You see, I do plenty of research for my articles.) These properly understood maxims should alert us right away that big corporations and Wall Street magnates are not as a class interested in the preservation of peace and free competition. It is extremely rare to see any prominent businessman take a principled position in favor of liberty, although, of course, many have contributed to the cause financially. Now companies, normally, want profits. And profits come into being due to correct forecasts of future market conditions. In particular, any well-anticipated and quickly-dealt-with change will confer an advantage to a firm. It can happen that economic liberalization will benefit a company. It can also happen that an imposition of suffocating regulations or taxes will benefit a company, especially if its costs of dealing with them are smaller than they are for its competitors. It can easily happen that a monopoly privilege will benefit a company. The Ford corporation, for example, would much rather sell 10,000 cars for $1,000,000 each than 1,000,000 cars for $10,000 each. If it could gain from the state a legal monopoly on car-making, it would be overjoyed. In short, businessmen are not in business of reforming the world. They are out, correctly, to make a buck (and, hopefully, to enjoy their work). And most of them deal with state policies as a given. If there is peace, businesses that cater to the buying public, producing houses and dresses and mangos and books and millions of other things that make us happy, will enjoy an advantage. But if there is war, businesses that serve the government, such as the arms industry, will benefit in the same way. (More precisely, businesses that will correctly anticipate a war will profit.) At the same time I strongly suspect that the influence on policy of the "merchants of death" is highly overrated. The federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on the military not because it wants to please the contractors who manufacture weapons. It does so in order to have the means to channel its influence over the rest of the world, and it is supported in this endeavor by hordes of "conservatives" who exalt destructive power. Change the ideology, and the government-connected arms dealers will swiftly go out of business. It is true, of course, that examples of companies using the government to cartelize their industry, to drive competitors out of business, or to raise the costs of entry of new entrepreneurs or professionals are not unheard of. Conspiracies do happen, as do honest mistakes. But companies should not be blamed if they follow through on their incentives to use big government to their advantage. The problem is not the company; in fact, our moral intuitions are often powerless here, because the harm done is unseen and diffused and legally authorized. The problem is the big government. Any short-term change will be good for business if it is foreseen and acted on and bad for business if its significance is missed. So if a businessman, in his capacity as a citizen, wants to advocate free markets, then glory and honor be to him. But the business class as such is far from such concerns and, I think, rightly so. It is only a correct, commonly accepted ideology exalting peace, private property, and freedom that can ensure that self-interested actions of entrepreneurs will be directed into socially beneficial projects. Otherwise, even war can be good for business for some, though it may impoverish the nation or the world as a whole.
September 5, 2006 Dmitry Chernikov [send him mail] is a graduate student in philosophy at Kent State University. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com |
Now
if one day I feel that I need a break from philosophy, I may try
to write a script for a science fiction show. Oh, it will have sinister
enemies, and mysteries, and witty dialog, and arcs, and spectacular
space battles. But my space station will be privately built,
there will be plenty of commercial traffic flowing back and forth,
my characters will have believable and sometimes complex motivations,
and in one episode I may even throw in a Catholic missionary who
makes a stop on his way to convert the heathen aliens. Finally,
there will be absolutely no close-ups. I hate close-ups!
Any good marketing guys out there who can help me sell this to NBC?