SN: You surprise me.
First, I have done the research, and it shows that the revenue from PCT hikers using the Whitney Zone $15 permit for resup is bupkis. That is of course, an approximation. Your assertion, that "a lot of people" were paying the $15 fee, is admittedly without research. Its speculation. As is Britonwhtny's data.
Second, the fact that no one seems to care that PCT hikers are being prohibited from exiting at Whitney seems to indicate that they are not being allowed to do something that no one was doing anyway. You do not want to get into my dissertation on meaningless abstraction here. As in "Why aren't the rich resentful of the fact that they are not allowed to sleep under bridges?"
So you have successfully established that Inyo is losing no revenue for which there is any evidence, and that zero hikers are being deprived of a route that no one was using.
Now, as an engineer, you should appreciate that Occam's Razor explicitly applies to the known facts, by definition. In its usual form it is stated as follows: of the available explanations of the known facts, the simplest is the most likely correct.
In other words, you don't get to make shit up. Such as "the existing system was being abused somehow". The key word here being "somehow". That's speculation, not known fact.
