SadrasStudent

Interest rates substantially exceed the sort of overhead costs you mentioned. While interest rates to cover such costs would not qualify as unearned income, interest rates beyond that level do. I think the major point where we part may actually be more fundamental than the question of interest. Rather, it seems perhaps where we part is the question of a return to ownership more generally. You speak of the right to earn a return on one's investment. I recognize no such right, at least not in the sense of a return to ownership. Any return to ownership is exploitative. It's a charge-for-use and hence, in the literal etymological sense, "usury." This is hardly unique to interest, but nevertheless does still apply to interest. If there is an acceptable return on investment, it is a return to the organization as opposed to ownership. In other words, the distinction is between the legitimate entrepreneur and the illegitimate rentier.

State-backed lantifundas (whose property claims hold no Lockean legitimacy) driving peasants off their ancestral lands.

Or is it the best available alternative often only because other alternatives have been forcibly closed off?

Br. Kadhim: While I've greatly enjoyed your posts over the past couple of years and have usually been in agreement, this appears an exception. While you are absolutely right to center your focus on exploitation, the difference between "moderate" and "immoderate" interest (at least if we mean the basic rate of real interest) is only the rate of exploitation. Either way, one person appropriates a portion of another person's labor-product. Granted, this is by no means unique to interest. It is the common feature of all unearned income. Indeed, exploitation is even more general than this - this simply covers "realized exploitation." That being said, this is more properly an argument against unearned income generally than for the suppposed legitimacy of interest. You have a point that simple criminalization is likely to be neither an efficient nor an effective method of dealing with the issue. There are other ways to attack interest, however. For one, stop creating money through politically priviliged banking oligopolies. Instead: GREENBACKS. Also, socialize the return on wealth without confiscating assets. How? Full taxation of economic rent. Besides a full-scale land value tax, this would also need to include checks on monopoly and finance capital. Right now about all we do about monopoly capital is break up non-natural monopolies and tax/regulate natural ones. Instead, bring natural monopolies under public ownership (preferably at the most local level possible). Extend anti-trust activity to systematically breaking up non-natural oligopolies. As for natural oligopolies, tax away all monopoly profits. As for finance, put a tobin tax on all financial markets to actively deter speculation. Also, full taxation of all hoarded and fictious capital - i.e. a steep wealth tax exempting direct tangible investment. The above policy regime would at very least go a long way toward elminating the realization of exploitation. That leaves exploitation-as-such. The only real way to put a dent in that is to go all out enabling self-employment and co-ops.

There's no rational problem with supernatural beings per se. In fact, we can even prove the existence of supernatural beings (even besides Allah). Given Allah's simple unity and our world's complexity, there must exist a hierarchy of increasingly complex supernatural beings to make the transition. That being said, you are right to question specific tales. The problem begins when we anthropomorphize supernatural beings. Insofar as certain tales treat supernatural beings anthropomorphically, one may supsect this aspect of such tales is somehow allegorical.

Brother Rehmat, First off, many thanks for striving to raise awareness against capitalism. I do have some questions/comments, though. I hope you will take the comments as constructive criticism. Meanwhile, I hope to learn from your answers to my questions. First off, while I know we've talked before about how you define capitalism, how do you define "socialism"? Without such a definition, its presence on your list of isms is as it were less obvious than the others. Next, I'd argue paper money itself is not the problem. Paper money is actually a rather good thing in itself. The problems arise when banks and others introduce usury into the paper mopney system. This allows politically priviliged banks who hold a collective monopoly on money creation to collect hundreds of times more riba as they are now charging it on money they are creating rather than money from depositors. If we took away the banks' political priviliges and broke up their monopolies, though, the very same system of paper money would force banks to bid each other down to zero interest. Or, if we take the right of money creation away from banks entirely and restore it to the government as you wisely suggest, this actually requires paper money. Without paper money, the government could not create new money to avoid severe deflation. The gold system actually benefits capitalist parasites. Granted, fractional reserve banking under state sponsored monopoly conditions benefits them even more. Yet if they can't have the latter. capitalist parasites will quickly choose the former. Why is this? Under a gold-based system, the supply of gold severely limits the supply of money. This in turn means money becomes an intensely valuable commodity on account of its scarcity. You may be objecting now that in a riba-free Islamic system money is no longer a commodity. That's the standard line, but it's simply not true. A variable profit-share is still a price for money. The more scarce money is, the higher proportion of a profit share lenders will be able to command. That means more and more for capital and less and less for labor. Yet the proper goal of an Islamic system is to abolish all parasitism. This includes all real returns to capital. The just price of capital reduces to that of the labor involved - first the labor necessary to produce the capital and secondly the labor necessary to manage it. Granted, the system of zakat, by imposing substantial carrying costs on money, alleviates many of the problems involved with the gold system. It makes more sense, though, to avoid the gold system in the first place. Then zakat can do its job even more effectively. Finally, Qutb may be a much better example of Islamic anti-capitalism than Maududi. Maududi himself had de facto a pretty capitalistic interpretation of Islamic economics. While his rhetorical touches were strongly anti-capitalistic, the substance of his recommendations only critiqued certain particular aspects of capitalism rather than getting at the very heart of the matter. If anything, Maududi's interest had more to do with Islamic identity than social justice for those in the slums.

As predominant theory, yes. As absolute truth, no.

There isn't a lot of good stuff available on Iqtisad (Islamic Economy). Most is just mindless rhetoric. Much is pretentious pseudo-science. Even the best stuff avaible is only a first step forward and leaves much to be desired. That's not to say it's not a worthwhile project. On the contrary, I consider the project of Iqtisad a must. That being said, there is a mind-boggling amount of work to do. Those who think Shahid Sadr coclusively refuted Marxism and and outlined the perfect economic system are getting way ahead of themselves. Shahid Sadr's is indeed in many (perhaps most) ways the best work on the subject. It was only the initial breakthrough that got the ball rolling, though. Iqtisaduna is as clumsy as it is seminal. Yet instead of going forward, most writers on Iqtisad have been going backward. Iqtisad has become the intellectual propaganda arm of the so-called "Islamic" banks. These banks make even more obscene profits than their Western counterparts. Instead of seeing this as indicative of the rip-off that it is, Muslims are parading this as a sign of sucess and Allah's favor.

Yes, global capitalism is collapsing. I don't necessarily think it's the final death of the beast, though. It may just shed its old skin yet continue slithering about. Without critiquing the specific link in question, there's a tendency for some who write about Iqtisad (aka Islamic economy) to take an overly mechanical approach in applying hadith from over a thousand years ago to a very different situation without adequately accounting for what one very different author (whose name escapes me) calls "time/space differences." That being said, I am all for wealth taxation and public ownership of energy resources. It would be a mistake, however, to say wealth taxation is the only Islamically legitimate taxation or that the public sector should be strictly limited to the three matters mentioned in the quoted hadith.

While there are always dangers in oversimplifying, I'll try anyway, The fossil record does not and cannot of itself solve the evolution/creationism contreversy. What is really at stake is not the fossil record itself but the fossil record's interpretation. My point earlier is that modern science's methods of interpretation inevitably support evolution. If you want to challenge evolution, you must challenge the methods of modern science. Very few seem willing to do so. That actually somewhat surprises me as there may potentially be a decent philosophic case for such a challenge.