And the buying and selling of intergers is complete hooey. One might as well buy bridges or swamp land in Florida. End of the day, its not addresses that are valuable, its the routing slots in the ISP routers. You know that and still persist in flogging this dead horse. :)
Why is this so hard to believe? Real estate is mostly a free market, and that seems to perform pretty well for the most part. How is address space that different? Please explain how you believe this would destroy the internet.
There's a lot more available real estate than available v4 address space. That's the biggest one. Second, groups that make the Internet go aren't necessarily the ones who can afford the address space. Third, there's no root owner of the address space, so who is going to sell it?
But really, you just need the first one: small space. The relatively small pool means that a large company with lots of money could buy the whole ARIN chunk of the Internet. Speculators would probably buy address space and leave it unused, much like they do for domain names. Address space would have to be bought and sold on arbitrary borders, resulting in massive fragmentation of the tables.
On the good side, address-based lawsuits would revitalize our flagging litigous economy ;-)
(in a shameless self-promotion) there was a paper written a while ago by myself, Paul Resnick and Steve Bellovin on the topic of charging for IP addresses:
Rekhter, Y., Resnick, P., Bellovin, S., "Financial Incentives for Route Aggregation and Efficient Address Utilization in the Internet", Coordination the Internet, MIT Press, 1997
Yakov.