|  Libertarian
radio talk show host Lowell Ponte is described on the Liberty Broadcasting
website as "Perhaps the Smartest Person on Radio." It might
just be true.
Ponte -- who broadcasts for three hours every Saturday and Sunday --
spent 15 years as the science and health editor for Reader's Digest
magazine, writing about a vast range of scientific and medical issues.
As a foreign correspondent, he visited 32 countries, and he worked as
a think-tank futurist on classified research for the Pentagon.
He is a regular columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com, and his essays
have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times,
and The Wall Street Journal.
Ponte is also an iconoclast. The motto of his talk show is: "Where
we turn sacred cows into hamburger." That disregard for scared
cows shows up in his libertarian commentary on FrontPageMagazine.com.
Some examples:
* On terrorism: "War, as the libertarian saying goes, is the health
of the state. It abolishes opposition and leads people to unify behind
their government. It justifies new limits on civil liberties. Each act
of terrorism could become a demand by government to take another bite
out of your freedom." (September 13, 2001)
* On innovation: "Liberty includes the right to take chances, like
explorers sailing to new worlds. Some will fail. Others will succeed,
and they produce the great leaps forward for the rest of humankind."
(May 31, 2002)
* On the free market: "Capitalism is the only natural economic
system, the only system fully compatible with human rights and liberty."
(March 22, 2000)
* On cloning: "We are individuals, not a collective. Individuals,
not government, own their bodies. You have a human right to reproduce
by any means possible, so long as this does not involve use of force
or fraud against others." (May 31, 2002)
However, even the "Smartest Person on Radio" occasionally
gets it wrong. In 1976, Ponte penned a book entitled The Cooling,
which warned of an impending ice age. In it, he wrote: "If it continues
... the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world
war, and this could all come by the year 2000." Fans of Ponte's
radio show, known as "Ponte-acks," are glad that particular
prediction didn't come true.
-- Bill
Winter
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Quotable
"We
must reverse the drift towards socialism and move back towards the libertarian
conservative individualism of America's founders. We need less centralized
government power, less dependency on government, more self reliance,
and vastly lower taxes so that people can afford to provide more of
their own needs." -- Lowell Ponte on FrontPageMagazine.com (August
18, 2003)
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