Ahh, you have to love Americans' capitalistic tendencies. I mean, where else can you spit in the face of someone hoping to enjoy a low-cost stay in a national park by reserving a $20 campsite in Yosemite National Park and then putting it up for auction for $249 on Ebay?
OK, to be fair, that price is for three nights in that campsite, so the person auctioning site No. 48 in the Lower Pines campground in the Yosemite Valley is only seeking $189 for his trouble in securing the site via the federal government's nation-wide recreation system. And if you can't find time to head to Yosemite from August 24-27, site No. 402 in the North Pines campground is reserved for August 12-15 and being offered for a mere $174.
Another seller with a conscious is offering a campsite in the Upper Pines campground July 25-26 for a mere $27.
Park officials say there currently is nothing they can do.
“Apparently it’s been going on for a couple years. It’s not just us. It’s anyone on the reservation system. There’s nothing that says that sites aren’t transferable," Yosemite spokeswoman Adrienne Freeman tells me. "We don't condone this. We’re looking for ways to prohibit this, including working with Ebay. But it doesn’t fall under the penal code for scalping.
"The bottom line is these sites should be available to the American public for a reasonable price. That’s what camping is all about.”
Thanks to Glenn Scofield Williams for tipping us to this story.
Comments
Jim, excellent response. You have done your homework!
Jim----I'd like to recommend the work of the Austrian school of economics, most especially that of Ludwig Von Mises.
True freedom is derived from private property and the voluntary exchange of goods and services. The government as equalizer always ends in disaster and tyranny. Just look at history.
It's not that difficult folks -- you ask to see some ID and ask for the reservation number before you give the guy his space. No ID match, no campsite. Even an illegal alien with no English skills can manage that process. There won't be an empty site during peak demand seasons -- there'll be someone getting there bright and early (probably me) hoping to be first on the waiting list, and then the park gets the $20 of the person who reserved and didn't show, PLUS the $20 of the person who actually used the site. Why would you deny the park of the money it's entitled to? If I rent a condo to someone for a week at the beach, they're not entitled to turn around and rent it to someone else -- it's not their condo.
I had six tickets to Cal Ripken's last game purchased at $10 apiece. Could have sold them for $300 apiece or more on eBay, but I opted to sell two of them for $10 each and I made sure it was someone who really appreciated it, not some sleazeball off the street slinking up to me asking if I had an extra ticket.
Now there's a place in society where costs have spiraled out of control -- professional sports. If people weren't spending so much money on overpriced tickets to baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey, they'd have money to burn for park entrances fees. Think about it -- family of 4 at a single NFL game would cost about the same (or more) as reserving a campground for a fortnight. Unless of course you're going to the 'Bama game in which case you can rent an RV for two weeks instead :)
One final thought -- you think all these intrepid entrepreneurs are paying taxes on the money they made reselling campground reservations and sports tickets? Any tax experts out there? I don't know for certain, but wouldn't you think they should be paying income tax on that money they made?
-- Jon Merryman
I totally agree. Non-transferrable reservations would be the way to go here. If people think they need to bid on a public service, they are way off base. Public means open to everyone and to me, at a reasonalble price.
Should people want to pay a lot, put a donation to the Yellowstone organisation. Then you know it will be put to good use.
"If people think they need to bid on a public service, they are way off base. Public means open to everyone and to me, at a reasonable price".
In a nation where equality is everything, and where advantage need not be earned, but only redistributed, how could anything be more virtuous?
Well at least I understand the socialist mindset of most of the readers of this website. This will not keep me from howling in the wilderness about the virtues of the free market and the advantages it holds over the statist vision of government dominated wild land and recreation areas. Your faith in Big Brother astounds me.
Beamis,
I'm a little surprised you have me pegged, after my remarks, as a "government as equalizer" sort of person, especially when I criticized government solutions, pointed you to a set of essays where I said that a government "right" to Yellowstone National Park simply does not exist, and let you in on the fact that I was "anti-authoritarian."
Most of the people here, I would suspect, are not socialists but liberals in the John Rawls sense, meaning that they believe that free enterprise is okay so long as there is some kind of safety net. Perhaps, there are a few socialists, who would see a large state solution as the means to the ends of a stateless society. I don't throw in with either of those camps. Both to me are paternalistic and arrogant in their faith of knowing what's best for the world; I think I understand and appreciate the libertarian impulse not to give up control to people who would urge global solutions to things they cannot possibly understand at such a macro level.
Nevertheless, I critiqued the idea that free enterprise makes for everyone being happy. In fact, it doesn't. There's no guarantee of that at all. You can become decidedly "unfree" if you aren't at the top of the trading chain. I did not say, "Therefore, governments should control campground fees at a fair market value" the way that liberals and socialists might. I didn't say anything at all. For me, the struggle is on different terms, against hierarchy (in the grand sense) and the presumptions of people who justify various types of these hierarchies. So called free market capitalism and socialism are both on the same continuum.
All that will still come down to the question of what I would do about the question of campground fees and who should control their sale and whether they should be available for re-sale. If one doesn't support the government or private individuals having control, and small-scale collectivism (my preferred choice in a different world) isn't a viable option given the practical reality, then the only question is which solution has the best tactical possibility of contributing to a world where our ends are possible. I believe that comes by supporting public control, not because public control is justified, but simply because the more diffuse the ownership right that is claimed, the more abstract it is, the easier it is to actually resist. And, resisting this privilege is the main aim I have. I think anyone who actually looks at libertarian views closely and really wants to protect life, liberty, and property (as opposed to the "right" to life, liberty, and property), will see that capitalism and the "free market" is a fool's gold (so to speak). The best way is to see that we have no basis to say that one being is more worthy than another and to resist all the forces that enforce arbitrary values to the contrary.
Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World
"You can become decidedly 'unfree' if you aren't at the top of the trading chain." I disagree. I am certainly not at the top of the trading chain, nor do I aspire to be, but the free market offers me a virtually unlimited set of options with which to innovate, collaborate and grow that have nothing to do with climbing some hierarchal ladder of domination and control.
All of society's innovations and advancements come from the free market. Toyota is building hybrid cars because its customers and the market demanded it, the iPhone, which is about revolutionize personal electronic communications, was invented because the market place was ready for it and needed it and getting around the country cheaply via Southwest Airlines was accomplished because they saw that the old hub-and-spoke design of conventional air travel was expensive and inefficient, so they just came up with a new point-to-point system that has revolutionized air travel to the benefit of its customers and the economies of the areas they serve.
I'm very happy to have the choices that I do in a the free market of ideas and capital. All transactions are voluntary. I can participate up the point that I feel comfortable and then opt out when I feel like that enough is enough. With government's ability to levy (confiscate) my wealth to use on destructive things like unjust wars, farm subsidies, theft of people's land (Grand Teton & Shenandoah N.P.) and the illegal detention and spying on of innocent and un-indicted persons is something I have little to no control over. As the old reggae songs says "No matter who you vote for, da government always gets in."
Your idea of small-scale collectivism is never a good road to go down because it never stays small and by forcing anything in that direction always distorts it and eventually destroys it. Just like in nature, economics is a force for efficiency and growth. The collection plate at my church is where small-scale and voluntary collectivism works best, but here we are answering to a much higher authority.
How unlimited are your options? Anyone can find unlimited options, in a manner of speaking, from within a prison cell. They can count sheep, they do push ups, they can scratch themselves, they can imagine all the things they aren't doing. From the standpoint of number, even the smallest atom has within it unlimited numbers of options. But, that's to equivocate, no? When we say unlimited, we mean something else, and if one thinks that Bill Gates, the President of the United States, you, a child dying of AIDS in subsaharan Africa, a prison inmate, a woman on the Pine Ridge reservation have the same unlimited choices, you'd be guilty of a blind delusion. If you mean to say that within our own limits, we have so much we can do, that's a truism. It says nothing about justice, especially whether we can justify our particular range of choices as opposed to someone else's.
A most startling thing to say! What can make you so sure? Let's keep reading.
Wow, quite remarkable. These are the great innovations and advancements of civilization under capitalism? I'm quite impressed. These apparent innovations and advancements only make my own case stronger.
You know that's nonsense, and I allude to my example in my first response to you. People are deeply affected by the choices of others through no choice of their own. Freedom does not exist in a vacuum (nor does anything else in nature). We cannot atomize relational choices into their component parts and see how they move as though nothing else in the system matters. So, each of our choices causes an involuntary reality for some other being. Even if you and I trade voluntarily, the new reality where that trade happens and affects everything and everyone else, came quite involuntarily. Perhaps, that's why we live in a world where iPhones and hybrid cars are mistaken for human progress. Who set the market on determining those values? More importantly, who didn't? Who was left out?
That's only because there isn't a movement of solidarity strong enough to stop it in part because we are cannibalizing each other using this myth of free trade. My notion that public interests are easier to resist than private actually is an adaptation of Aristotle's views on the subject, someone you libertarians love to quote. I've just inverted the purpose.
I'm not looking for a world without struggle or trying to control the fate of our world. All collectives will break down just as all our bodies break down in death. Just the fact we live in a universe where we can't know the full implications of a single one of our actions should make us humble about trying to understand what allows for "efficiency and growth" much less trying to determine the specific application of those values. The question isn't whether small collective ownership is infallible but whether it is rational given humanity's relatively blind place in the universe. For a lot of reasons too myriad to explore here or at this time, I think that it is the most rational and most consistent with our experience. Everything else is far too large for us to grasp and control.
Anyhow, this is interesting, but people here will want to know we really do care about campground fees in the parks. I will assert again that there is another path between the right of public control over spaces and so-called free market control. And, if we see this issue in isolation, we will never get at the larger implications. I mean, aren't people tired of these issues constantly popping up like weeds? No matter how you answer this question by itself, you are going to be pissing a lot of people off.
Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World