Islamic banks usually revolve around profit-sharing. They lend a business money, and share in the profits - if the business receives no profits for a year, the rentier receives no return on their money.
On a side note, Alan Greenspan wrote an essay called "Gold and Economic Freedom" in the 1960's, when he was less discerning insofar as fear that people might perceive him as one of those wacked out gold bugs. You can find the essay on the Internet via http://www.google.com . To give you a sense of the tone, the essay opens:
"An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense-perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire-that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.
In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society."
The key idea, perhaps, being expressed later on:
"But the opposition to the gold standard in any form-from a growing number of welfare-state advocates-was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes."
Of course, one must have gone through the kind of Orwellian doublethink Greenspan obviously had to go through to perceive an heir who, like many ancestors before himself, has never worked a day in his life, and whose only relation to production is the surplus labor value he expropriates from those who work to produce wealth, as a "productive" member of society, while a member of the working poor who, due to the fact that the non-working owner of his company expropriates enough of the wealth that the worker creates to force him into poverty and the collection of food stamps, is presumably a non-productive member of society.
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