Bottom line, if someone wants to pay for a campsite reservation that another person obtained legally, well then, that is just fine with me. Both parties are happy, end of story.

No, it's not the end of the story. If I might have gotten that spot for $20, but you snapped it up and sold it to some rich guy, then what am I supposed to do? I didn't ask for that reality. Now, the rich have access, and those who have a special skill for snapping up campsites have a business. And, everyone else is left out in the cold. A lot of people aren't happy, and that's just the single issue of the campsite itself (there are a lot of other intertwining things as well).

Again, your market is not the vacuous paradise you'd like it to be. There is never an end to the story of even the smallest action we take in life.

Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World

I am curious why your first assumption is that the reservation was sold to some "rich guy"? It may very well have been sold to a group of Tibetan monks or bought by a church charity to be given to a poor family from the projects or maybe even to a downtrodden Native American from Pine Ridge, SD.

"Now, the rich have access, and those who have a special skill for snapping up campsites have a business." Well maybe. I've made a lot of money on eBay selling things I've bought at yard sales from people who could've probably used the extra money. What should I have done? Passed up the opportunity because I knew I'd be haunted by the dictum: "There is never an end to the story of even the smallest action we take in life."

You know, your world view can get to be a bit paralyzing.

Real life requires real actions.

0r as Prince Hamlet once said "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

I wasn't making an assumption; I was speaking to a hypothetical situation. But, as for yard sale items, there's nothing that says you couldn't just give them some money, share the profits of your ebay sale (though that sale in itself is rife with difficulty), or organize with them against a system that puts you at odds with them and judges success and value by a profit margin. You had plenty of other choices, and plenty of other actions possible to you. Most of us with any kind of privilege at all do (if only to organize), but as long as we live with the veil of powerlessness, we are going to think that all we can do is live to maximize our goods at the expense of everyone else. And, that's a travesty on so many levels.

But, let's take what you are saying seriously for a moment. It's true that I breathe and move, and I don't understand whether my breathing and moving is for good or for bad. I breathe anyhow. Fair enough. What I don't do is build an economic system where I pretend that my success at breathing is an honest-to-God value whose capital should be maximized and re-invested. In the natural world, we breathe, and we let the chips fall as they may. We take action because of what we are prone to do by nature. In the capitalist world, we see that we are breathing, turn our breath into a commodity, and do our best to maximize that value as though no other alternative could possibly be worthwhile. That's not nature; that's abstract at its worst. It leads to relative powerlessness for most and the sad fact we as a world haven't lived anywhere near our potential. In making a commodity of one aspect of our existence, we've forfeited much more coherent values. Instead of breathing, it's the price of our breath (or our life, or our iPhone, or our progress, or our eBay item) that matters. And, that's why we are talking about such obtuse things as whether a campground spot should be re-sold instead of the birds of the air and the touch of our lover's cheek.

We are active beings by nature; we don't need a mechanical system to dictate our actions for us - all the capitalists and socialists and the liberal hybrids (perhaps, a pun intended) should be very careful of losing sight of the trees that make up the forest.

Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World

I'm a bit astonished at some of the reactions. This being a National Parks site, I thought there would be folks here who have an appreciation that we even have such resources. Instead, I see greed and capitalism-at-all-costs professed as "how it should be". What are you guys doing here, anyway, looking for some way to profit from the national park and forest system? I'm glad you weren't around when they were established, we'd have a bunch of McDonald's and Holiday Inns instead of a national heritage.

Sure, call in and buy up the campsites that you know will be in demand, because it is summer and that's the only time some folks can get off work to go there. Then sell it to the richest SOB you can find, boy, yeah, that's America in action! Get yours, to heck with everybody else, right? Even though you added absolutely nothing of value to what you're selling, call in early and get what you can, then gouge what you can out of some poor working guy who couldn't get through on the phone for his reservation because you and the other profiteers had the lines jammed up. Now THAT's putting our national parks to good use in the good old American way...for your personal profit, yup boy.

And what's this about a can of worms being opened by making the reservations non-transferable? You make your reservations; if you can't go, you call and they refund all but $10 of your money, big deal, what's so difficult about that? So you can't give them to your buddy, if he wants to go then go with him, or have him call and make his own reservations. If that's a "problem", I'd hate to see what happens when actual real problems come up.

I'm glad that this forum doesn't represent the norm, at least out in our part of the west. Many of us here consider Yosemite a national treasure, and are grateful that folks had the foresight (and the fortitude to battle greedy capitalists who saw only dollars, sound familiar?) to at least try to preserve it for future generations.

That's right, encourage profiteering from anything you can find; grab up those campsites and auction them off. Then we'll see a bunch of spoiled yuppies in their rented motorhomes filling up what used to be a nice place, no doubt traipsing through everyone else's camp, leaving out their food for the bears, and working at their laptops while the kids watch DVD's from their campsite, so they can keep up with their ebay sales and investments.

Some of you don't deserve to have national parks; you deserve what would be the product of your dream, a bunch of paved strip malls where people can do what's really important, make money.

hi gary- aside from respectfully suggesting you might want to check your tone (see the last paragraph in your comment, re-read and please reconsider...) i would also like to suggest that you might actually want to investigate the cash (at least the national forest reservation system) extortion fees charged (minimum night stays, reservation fees, etc.) by the concessionaires and then possibly consider writing your congressional team (skip the nps/usfs folks) and direct your passion in that direction. it's the government, not the commenters on this site, degrading the overall values in our cherished national park system by allowing the "concessionaires" to "profit" by running the reservation systems...

Gary, and tell 'em "Anonymous" told you so... ;-)

-- Jon