Bits and pieces

• Congestion "pricing"? Road "pricing"? These are taxes, folks; flat rate excise duties payable on the act of driving a car across a line. There is no market in permissions to use a road; there isn't even any variability of the "price" with demand, although there are nebulous proposals to introduce it at some unspecified point in the future on the basis of something not unlike Soviet central planning. I think I will put forward proposals for "inheritance pricing", "capital gains pricing" and "a progressive rate of income pricing" and see if I can get such breathless support for them from the Wall Street Journal, Economist, etc.
  
  
• Just a little bit of help for any New Yorker fact-checkers out there looking for the source of a quotation commonly attributed to Keynes and regularly in the financial press:
  
  "The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent".
  
  It doesn't appear anywhere in any of Keynes' work to the best of anyone's knowledge. The first published appearance that I've been able to find is in "The Money Game" by George Goodman (writing as "Adam Smith"), who attributes it to Keynes. When quoted in this form, Goodman is almost certainly the original source.
  
  However, the quote is probably not bogus or apocryphal. When this came up on the PEN-L mailing list, we ended up concluding that the original source was almost certainly Joan Robinson, and that therefore Keynes probably made this remark at seminars at Cambridge in the 30s; there are a number of Keynes quotes where the trail ends up with Robinson in this way.
  
  
• And here is my attempt to branch out into the Gina Ford market with a top child-rearing tip; while a real gun is obviously a much more dangerous weapon than a real sword, a toy gun cannot be used to hit other kids round the head with, although a toy sword can.