The Lead
Epstein Economics and the Danger of Thermonuclear War
by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Feb. 07, 2026
” …Private appetite is the measure of good and evil.… Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.… I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death.”
The above reads like Jeffrey Epstein’s credo, equally applicable to the hundreds and thousands of oh-so-respectable members of the trans-Atlantic Establishment who grace the millions of pages of the recently released Epstein files. But the above quote is taken from Thomas Hobbes’s infamous Leviathan of 1651—one of the foundational essays of modern liberal society, and its economy dedicated to the untrammeled pursuit of speculative profit, greed and pleasures of the flesh.
Epstein, you see, was not original.
Today, the Western financial system, and its $2.4 quadrillion of unpayable speculative financial instruments, is the predictable consequence of a society guided by this philosophical outlook of hedonism, where Man is viewed as just another animal who survives by bottom-feeding on others. As a result, we have a cryptocurrency bubble that soared to $4.35 trillion global market capitalization last October, after President Donald Trump announced he would make America the crypto-capital of the world, and has since collapsed to half that amount—wiping out over $2 trillion in Monopoly money “wealth.” We have the market in U.S. Treasuries being eaten alive by hedge fund speculators. And we have a rip-tide of “reverse carry trade” flows sucking funds out of the Global South, back to financial institutions in Japan and the United States, threatening with a new wave of bankruptcies.
The City of London and Wall Street are responding to the double existential threat they are facing—their own bankruptcy, coupled with the emergence of an alternative economic approach centered in the BRICS and China’s Belt and Road Initiative—with the same approach they took in the 1930s: Schachtian economics. Named after the London-imposed head of Hitler’s central bank, Hjalmar Schacht, the logic is simple: vastly increase arms spending, and use the expanded military to wage war and loot nations to the bone, to try to prop up the speculative bubble. This is the process we already see underway in Merz’s Germany, and in President Trump’s announcement that he plans to increase the U.S. military budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion per year.
And now, with the demise of New START, the floodgates have been opened to enormous new U.S. military expenditures on nuclear weapons, the Golden Dome, and so on, with the attendant danger of thermonuclear war.
Go back to Epstein economics, and compare that view of the insatiable thirst for pleasure and ever-more-degraded pleasure, with the outlook of one of the true Founding Fathers of both the United States and the American System of economics, the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. In his 1694 Felicity, Leibniz explained his understanding of happiness, and how society is properly ordered:
“Justice is charity or a habit of loving conformed to wisdom. Thus when one is inclined to justice, one tries to procure good for everybody, so far as one can, reasonably.… One even advances one’s own good in working for that of others…. Thus the sovereign wisdom has so well regulated all things that our duty must also be our happiness, that all virtue produces its own reward, and that all crime punishes itself, sooner or later.”
As a Republic founded on the Leibnizian principle that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” why should we not cooperate with a nation such as China, whose President calls for “win-win” collaboration with the United States, and states that “the financial system must never deviate from the real economy for speculative purposes”? Why not work with a nation such as Russia, whose President this weekend charged young scientists at a ceremony in the Kremlin with continuing their “thrilling vocation—the pursuit of progress. It is in this passion, this tireless quest for new knowledge, that the potential of great discoveries lies…. You look for and find solutions and are focused on a national and global scale.”
Contents
New World Paradigm
- Putin Addresses Russian Young Scientists (↓)
- Modi Declares, 'India Has Become the Strong Voice of the Global South' (↓)
Strategic War Danger
- Trenin Claims, 'Strategic Stability Now Rests on Fear' (↓)
- French Chief of Staff Proclaims That Baltic Is a ‘NATO Sea’ (↓)
- U.S. Accuses China of Secret Nuclear Test in 2020 (↓)
- Will the End of New START Mean Massive New Arms Spending? (↓)
- Russia Launches Another Mass Attack on Ukraine's Energy and Transport Grid (↓)
- Lavrov Insists, Russia Will Not Accept a Nazi Regime in Ukraine (↓)
- Suicide Bomber Kills 31 at Mosque in Pakistan's Capital, Islamabad (↓)
Collapsing Imperial System
- Contrary to Trump's Claims, India Is Unlikely To Cancel Oil Imports from Russia (↓)
- Crypto: Easy Come, Easy Go (↓)
