This is an absolutely massive response that I did not expect. I was more asking about breakdowns of the specific ways in which Star Trek's economics and politics violate credulity relative to real-world understandings of those concepts, rather than the more behind-the-scenes take on the matter, as I'm well familiar with Roddenberry being clueless, but your manner of phrasing things is endlessly entertaining, nevertheless.
A primary issue with doing this with Trek is that we're shown its military politics, not its civilian ones. Except for a few exceptions. Almost every race/alliance even seems to operate with an empire-wide single permanent government, even the Bajorians government with all the time its given over seven seasons of DS9 doesn't really seem to make complete sense even granting its status as a temporary post-occupation government. Rarely are civilizations shown as having political conflicts between their different planets, let alone on a single planet. It's kinda hard to buy even granted 300-400 years of the future. (Trek in general has an issue with time scales...just to pick on Voyager again, for their first three seasons or so they spend it all in Kazon space (a race that is shown with political differences and factions!) while in the other Treks you could fly to Earth, Romulus, Cardassia Prime and back to Earth in half that time span encountering who knows how many races. There are even single episodes where they seemingly do this.)
Economically, there's that whole semi-no-scarcity thing. That really messes with the supply/demand curve we base all our economics on.
That said, in some ways, we're a more advanced society than the Federation,
for one thing, we've invented tabs.
