Grand Strategy

I bought a stretchable Incredible Hulk at Kmart. For some inexplicable reason his fists are attached to his knees, so that any stretching that goes on makes him look oddly as if he's folkdancing. It does, however, raise a larger issue.

Why are there so many people in the world?

I am the only important person in the world - I hope we can all agree on that - and everybody else is here only to make my life richer and more fulfilled; that's axiomatic. And I think there's a degree of featherbedding. We could do more with less.

I'm not taking a narrow view of this, mind. I'm not just referring to the comparatively few people I actually meet or deal with. I quite appreciate that it takes a lot to run the entire supply chain from the iron mine to the part in my biro. I can see, from the economic point of view, that there need to be a lot of people in China to drive down the labor cost so that they can produce cheap Incredible Hulks for me, and a large amount of people in the West so that there can be a market for Incredible Hulk stretchables.

I just think that even taking all that into account it should be possible with a little planning to eliminate the need for about two people in three, absolute minimum. A billion people worldwide really should be the absolute outside.