Oilman – H.L. Hunt’s Book “Alpaca”
– This is the book by rich Texas Oil Man H. L. Hunt.
Titled “Alpaca,” the novel describes a utopia through the eyes of a Dallas billionaire. The author is H.L. Hunt, the legendary oil tycoon.
Haroldson Lafayette Hunt won his fortune in a poker game. He used a $30,000 bet in 1930 — $284,000 in today’s currency — to seize 5,000 acres of untested oil fields in East Texas. Under those fields, his workers found an ocean of oil.
Five years later, Hunt was worth $100 million, which today is worth roughly $1.2 billion.
Hunt lived in peaceful obscurity until the late 1940s, when Life magazine revealed him to be among the world’s richest men. During his remaining years, Hunt alternated between scandalous behavior and political idealism. “Alpaca” is a product of the latter. In his novel, Hunt describes Alpaca as a “little six-province nation” suffering under “an evil specter of dictatorship.” The perfect society, according to Hunt, would give the most votes to the oldest, the wealthiest and the most ambitious. Citizens younger than age 22 would get one vote. Older voters would get two votes. The top 25% of taxpayers would get an extra two votes. Citizens could earn bonus votes through scholastic achievement, by waiving government salaries or by paying a voluntary poll tax.
Under Hunt’s plan, a nation would divide itself into precincts of 2,000 voters. The precincts would send representatives to regional colleges, which would then choose national leadership.
“Where everyone participates,” Hunt writes, “none can monopolize authority.”
The perfect society would bar political discussion from TV, from radio and from all meetings of more than 200. By confining rhetoric to print, a society would protect the unstable masses from demagoguery.
Taxation would remain low. “Big taxes encourage overbearing and despoiling government,” Hunt writes, “and government has been and always will be destructive to human liberty.” The Oil depletion tax would be part of the constitution.
The perfect society would create a wage-and-hour commission to match workers with jobs. This, the billionaire writes, would end capitalism’s cycles of boom and bust.
Hunt published a sample of his perfect constitution in an appendix to “Alpaca.” His constitution, Hunt claimed, would produce a class of dedicated, prosperous citizens quietly working for the good of all.
Certain he had drawn the blueprint for a truly great society, Hunt published “Alpaca” out of pocket. He sent copies of his novel to top leaders in at least 20 nations. Those leaders sent back glowing reviews, hailing Hunt’s breakthrough in political thought.
