The reason these two ideas get commingled is because in practice they're indivisible. A high redistribution society requires high degrees of coercion and fascis

The reason these two ideas get commingled is because in practice they're indivisible. A high redistribution society requires high degrees of coercion and fascism. To get around this the usual Star Trek analysis (by fans, the series itself doesn't talk about it much) is that after replicators were invented, there didn't need to be capitalism anymore and so there's no money in the future and everyone just works on perfecting themselves. It's a wafer thin social idea that was never fleshed out because the writers themselves didn't believe in it. Roddenberry insisted but the writers often couldn't make it work which is why there are so many weird hacks, like saying the replicators can't replicate things as big as star ships and they mostly just ignore the whole topic. Also the replicators kill a lot of drama because they mean there can't be any valuable objects. There are obvious and basic objections to this idea that replicators = communism (in either direction). One is that you can't replicate services, and much economic activity today is the service economy. We see that the Enterprise has staff who do things like wait tables, cut hair and sign up for red uniform missions in which they will surely die, but why they do this in the absence of money is never explained. There's just this ambient assumption that everyone works because work is awesome. Getting back to the thread, the lack of philosophical rigor here is all on McFarland unfortunately. He doesn't actually have a critique of capitalism. He doesn't even seem sure what capitalism is, appearing to use the term to just mean contemporary society and anyone he doesn't like. Even his arguments against his strawman enemies are garbled and useless! He shits on Musk, saying that if Elon invented a replicator he'd patent it and hoard the tech to himself, ignoring that Tesla gave away its entire patent pool so anyone else could build electric cars using their tech. Musk - arch capitalist - did the OPPOSITE of what McFarland claims capitalists do, and he didn't even notice! All the rest of his argument is also like that. He makes absurd claims about governments, Republicans killing animals in TV ads, some non-sequitur about meatless sausages ... it's just this total grab bag of incoherent thoughts that make no sense and don't seem connected to each other, wrapped as "capitalism sucks, communism rules". If this were an essay I'd grade it an F. But in the end it's just a set of tweets. Those looking for philosophical rigor on the idea of an abundance machine need to look elsewhere.