TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

Yeah, economy isn’t just “money management” it’s “resource management”. I’m assuming it’s done by technocrats.

Technocrats generally don't do the actual labor. S1E25, Devil in the Dark, with the Horta is a great way to show how the TOS era federation handled resource extraction: Send out a colony of people with substandard, obsolete equipent that can't be replaced because nobody makes part for it any more; for a critical and dangerous form of power on a world where dangrous local critters can't even be detected by standard tricorders.

Only to find out the local critters stole said water pump, causing sed nuclear reactor to meltdown; and when it's all set and done, kirk leaves telling the miners to exploit the shit out o the horta. Oh. it's not portrayed that way. but neither is any of the colonial exploitation we've done ourselves.

Another example is S2E11, Friday's Child, where Kirk and gang interfere in a world's politics to ensure that they were getting resources and the klingons were not.

So, my POV is that when they had “bad admiral” episodes before “The Pegasus”, the idea was exactly that. Some individuals may become corrupted by their greed or ambition, and it’s up to the good people to keep them in check. That’s why I said “writers in the 90s” because that episode ruins star trek completely.

Like, seriously. Pegasus wasn't that bad. I know. I know. lets run it down:

• at some point prior to TNG, Ryker was serving under Pressman. Pressman's ship was being used as a testbed for an advanced prototype cloaking device that was against a certain treaty, rendering the whole thing even more classified than it obviously would be.
• That testbed was lost, with most of the crew, when it got stuck in some technobabble in what can be reasonably described as a research accident.
• Pressman managed to get off the ship, and ordered the survivors to abandon the ship and then subsequently swept everything under the rug. Everyone believed the ship and rest of the crew were dead and totally lost.
• At some point, the Pegasus gets found out and romulans are sniffing around. Also at some point, Pressman got promoted to Admiral and was part of SF inteligence.
• Enterprise with Ryker is ordered to search to recover it so the experiments can continue.
• when it becomes necessary to keep the ship from being destroyed or captured; he finally spills the beans resulting in the admiral (and his) arrest, the cloaking device being revealed to the romulans, etc etc.

literally all of that are things that have come up in some form or another in TOS. Science run amok. Military co-opting technology.... secrets getting in the way of justice, mutinies and things that might start wars. There's also Kirk running around unilaterally making society-altering decisions in violation of the prime directive.

The only real difference between Kirk and Pressman is that we're told Kirk is a good guy and the means justified those ends, while Pressman was a bad guy and the means didn't justify those ends. I mean that literally. Do you think Kirk trying to steal a romulan cloaking device was within the then-current peace treaty with Romulus. ( [x] Doubt).

you might not like the 90's era writers... but they're still within the bounds of "trek"

I think that was the point of the pre corrupt episodes of ST, that you have people from a “perfect society” placed in situations where behaving out of alignment with what they know is right would make everything easier; but because they are good and moral people, they take the hard routes and do the right thing, no matter how difficult it is. The conflict and drama come from them trying to stand up for ethics and morality, and interfacing with people that do not want to behave that way.

Good and moral people don't take fascist warlords genetically engineered to be assholes and let the escape all onto their lonesome selves. A good and moral government/military wouldn't take Kirk's report and be like "yeah cool story, bro" and let it be. Either kirk lied about what happened to Kahn, or SF was cool with Kahn being left on the barren shit show of a world. And lets be clear: that time, the ends were the eventual destruction of the USS Reliant, the potential destruction of entire worlds and said homicidal assholes holding a grudge and wanting to destroy everything.

btw kirk blew up a planet too. (the, uh, genesis world.)