I just got in from picking up after the dogs, and attending to some horse chores. That gives a guy a chance to think.
Thinking about Trial123's desire to have tags reflect the market value, I came up with an idea for trying it out in Montana. We actually had a first cousin of this some years ago, with licenses set aside for outfitters. They were priced to make likely the total elk tags sold did not exceed the mandated 17,000. If too many licenses were sold the price was raised. If the total sold fell under the cap, the price would be reduced.
An initiative actively opposed by the outfitting lobby, ended that program.
So, here the idea... beginning with maybe 500 elk tags from the 170000, put them up for auction. Maybe hold back the last 50 of those, to be sold individually, by auction of course.
If that proves successful, hold back additional tags to be sold at auction, until you find what the market will bear.
Actually, I would not want that.
No one puts forward a proposal that they do not individually think, would harm their interests. So, when some one proposes that tags should fetch the market price, you can be certain, they see themselves advantaged by that.
It would only serve a very small slice of non resident hunters to get the market price for each and every license. Instead of being unable to draw a tag, they just could not afford the price of a big game tag.
We have a supply and demand problem with no clean solution. We can't open up another factory to crank out more elk.