I've started a quotation blog: jaltcoh.posterous.com. My goal is just to keep track of quotations and avoid giving any of my own commentary. Unlike this blog, the intended audience is just me, though it's open for anyone to read. (The quotes might show up here later.) I was inspired to do this by Lost in the Funhouse, a similar blog by LemmusLemmus (whose main blog is Church of Rationality and who's also a regular commenter here).
A lot of them so far are from Thomas Sowell's excellent book Economic Facts and Fallacies, since that's what I've been reading lately. Tangentially, here's a good interview with him. (That page lets you play or download an mp3.)
And here he is, in 1980, in a lively exchange about welfare with a state welfare official named Helen Bohen O'Bannion, who turns out to be a perfect foil for Sowell:
A particularly revealing moment: When Sowell discusses skyrocketing rates of teenage pregnancy and children out of wedlock (throughout the US but especially among blacks), O'Bannion cavalierly quips that she isn't "making [welfare recipients] have illegitimate children." She seemed to assume, a priori, that a benevolent government program can only improve disadvantaged people's lives, and can't itself encourage the kind of behavior that causes them to be so disadvantaged in the first place. Sowell retorts: "Oh, you don't have to do that — you simply subsidize it." For a more up-to-date and rigorous account of how the United States' expansion of welfare beginning in the '60s created perverse incentives with predictable unintended consequences (especially miring blacks in poverty), I highly recommend the chapter entitled "Why Are You Talking About Blacks on Welfare?" in John McWhorter's book Winning the Race.
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