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We're already post scarcity on food, housing, and medicine. So let's make those free.
Who is going to do all the work to make all that stuff if it’s free?
In a market economy? Government employees.
In a communist economy? People who want to, same as they did for 100,000 years before money was invented.
Government employees are going to take over the farms and grow all the food? That’s not a market economy.
Furthermore if all that stuff is free then why are people still working?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh3xPatEto
The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity
- Captain Picard
Yes, I’ve watched TNG, the entire series, many times. We’re not even close to that! We don’t have replicators, we don’t have starships to take us to new planets for unlimited land to settle.
By the way, have you ever thought about how the Picard family owns this huge wine estate in France? Not everyone in the Star Trek universe gets their own family wine estate, so Picard’s family is wealthy and privileged even in a society without money.
Oh no, they have the ability to manually produce wine in a civilisation with no money, free replicators, and a synthetic form of alcohol that doesn't give hangovers and doesn't impair your faculties in an emergency. With such extravagant wealth, they could even... checks notes... give free alcohol to wine snobs
...which, to be fair, is exactly what the Picard family does with their vineyard. They devote their time and energy to making alcohol and giving it away for free. Because they're communists.
You’re thinking about it in terms of commerce. I’m talking about the luxury of a huge piece of beautiful land in the French countryside. Compare that to some basic apartment in San Francisco which probably looks like the crew quarters on the enterprise.
But anyone can go to that land and walk around. The transporters are free, you can get there in minutes from any city in the entire world. The only privilege is having a bedroom with a view.