Then there will always be disparities in talent. You can see this in every episode by the mere fact of the ships hierarchy. Why is Jean-Luc a Captain and some random dude just a lieutenant? Because Picard is better than that other dude. He's smarter, more ambitious, a better ass-kisser, maybe simply more lucky. Whatever, the point is there will always be people who have less talent and luck than others. Hence you will have poverty. Maybe it won't be the abject poverty we see in some places of our time, but there will always be people who have less. For example: look at a poor person in America, compared to sub-Saharan Africa. A poor American likely lives in a small apartment, with few frills, bad heat and no AC, but there is little chance of dying from exposure. They can always go to an emergency room if they are ill, although quality of care is suspect. They will also have access to abundant amounts of cheap food, albeit very bad for you. An impoverished sub-Saharan African, meanwhile, likely has no shelter, little to no access to ANY kind of medical care, and is in a constant state of malnutrition. Being poor in America is a helluva lot better than being poor in sub-Saharan Africa, but poverty still exists in America. 24th century poverty might seem pretty sweet to us, but poverty will still exist.

Unless they came up with a low cost energy source. Like Solar Energy, Cold Fusion or Antimatter . Besides its a sci-fi show.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/P50/

Granted, he doesn't say cold hard cash, but there is clearly a scarcity / supply and demand system at play here.

Didn't know he'd done another album.

But his first one (1968) was ranked #45 on a list of the 50 worst albums ever made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transformed_Man

That was on the episode called "The Gamesters of Triskelion", and 'quatloos' were never defined by the little glowing brain-beings that used them in wagering.

Judging by the look of the humanoid Thralls, I'd say quatloos had to do with mascara, hairspray, and artificial bearskins.

Shatner's record, "Has Been", produced by Ben Folds is exquisite. Wouldn't accuse Shatner of pretending to be a singer, though. Spoken word combined with music and guest performances.

The Trek universe has never been terribly consistent regarding details, but has generally striven for a positive view of "the future," one in which the characters work to resolve problems. Money was rarely if ever discussed on TOS (aside from alien currencies). In Star Trek II (Wrath of Khan) we do see a janitor vacuuming a corridor at Starfleet Academy. In Star Treks III and VI we also see kitchen staff wiping down tables and preparing food. So "grub work" probably still exists. (The reason for these details is directorial choice. Nicholas Meyer [II & VI] liked to include familiar touches like books, eyeglasses, old-fashioned furniture.) One could argue that humans still need to do all these chores on Star Trek, and therefore money may still be the incentive. However, one could also simply draw a comparison with modern life & technology: The Roomba sure saves one a lot of vacuuming, but has trouble with corners and shag carpeting. Windshield wipers are great, but one still must squeegee the wildshield by hand on occasion. You can subsist on fast food, but nothing beats a home-cooked meal. So we may perhaps assume that in Star Trek, everyone on a starship has a chore list and probably puts in a couple of hours a week picking up a few dust-bunnies the Roomba missed. Also, some people really LOVE to cook.

Besides, gakh is best served live. (And revenge is a dish best served cold.)

Star Trek IV - Not meaning to be less than gentlemanly, Kirk nevertheless sticks the marine biologist with the restaurant bill. "Don't tell me you don't use money in the 23rd Century!" "Well, we don't."

ST:TNG, pilot episode - We see Dr. Crusher buying some linen with some form of credit. My guess is that some form of money does exist, but seems to be unnecessary on Earth, in Starfleet, and possibly on all Federation worlds. This would make sense, but was never elaborated on. (A modern parallel would be the Euro, accepted all over Europe; Poland still uses zloty but did join the EU a few years ago.) Kirk probably also had credit for making purchases on a few participating worlds that still used money. But as any time-traveler quickly finds out, money from the future is not accepted in the past. (Unless it's made of "valuable" minerals. Klaatu's diamonds from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" are an example of this exception.) Kirk could not have paid for his spaghetti & Chianti, because in the 20th Century his account did not exist.

I've often had to explain to people during economic discussions that we often forget that money is really worth what "we" agree it will be worth. (Problems arise when balances change, people get greedy, and everyone starts imagining that money is more solvent than it really is.) A global currency unit might be a bad thing, or a very good thing. It might even be a step toward a money-less economy.

This, however, would require fully-automated trash collecting & recycling. And we'll all need to be taught from birth that one's happiness does NOT require another's misery (the root cause of greed). Otherwise, as HollywoodBob put it, society will get stratified all over again.

Oh - and re: vonSkippy: They do poo in Star Trek. Check out the blueprints for the Enterprise, and you'll see the commode fixtures in the crew quarters' bathrooms. They just never appeared on the show, like the Brady Bunch.

no doubt.

Someone mentioned rent and land values, land is only scarce if you can't leave the planet, millions of humans have migrated to the stars. Cityscapes are far more massive than they are now, and without the need to commute land that is currently uninhabited, could very well have been reclaimed and made into massive housing centers.

I ramble on about it on my website:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3al.html#consequences

With my tongue.

Before money, the so called "scut work" got done because it was recognised that it needed doing. I imagine that Star Fleet personnel would also recognise that, if they didn't crawl around inside a Jeffries Tube, something would stop working, the ship would break, and somebody could die.

Jake wants to buy his father a real, authentic 1951 Willie Mays baseball card. But his society is "far too advanced" to use money anymore. So instead of a single cash (or latinum) transaction, Jake has to waste DAYS of his life engaging in elaborate barter schemes.

BARTER. When confronted by scarcity, the best the poor citizens of the HIGHLY ADVANCED Federation can do is resort to economic practices used by civilizations existing in PREHISTORY.

And forget about the scarcity problem -- what about the misallocation problem? Given the subject, let's use William Shatner as an example. The man's an actor, a sci-fi writer, and a LEGENDARY singer . How should he allocate his time, talents and efforts?

In a cash economy, he knows that society values his acting skills quite highly, his writing skills somewhat, and his singing skills -- well, very little. He knows that he'll probably starve if he spends his life trying to cut albums. Society provides him with the incentives to devote his life to acting and writing.

Contrast that result with the results under Roddenberry's moneyless utopia. Even if William Shatner were a 100% altruist, how would he know how to spend his time to maximize the benefit to society? He might very well err and torture us all with more of his albums. And that's the sort of mistake that would happen ALL THE TIME in the Federation of a ST:NG universe.