One thing you can never fault Newt Gingrich on is not having ideas, the man is full of them. They aren’t ALWAYS the best of ideas, but they are ideas none-the-less. Two I found intriquing recently were on completely different topics.

The first was on his belief that Republicans will face massive losses, including the presidency, in 2008 if they continue to run stand by the president. This is interesting to someone watching the race for any number of reasons and you can take from it what you like.

The second is his plan for using government. While many of the Republicans during the debates scorned the government for spending money on research and other high priced items and using a leave the market to decide policy Newt sees things a little different. For instance Mars.

Rather then spend billions of dollars worth of the publics money to get humans there Newt takes the free market approach. Let corporations do it. The objective would be beneficial to mankind, would create massive discoveries in the sciences along the way and would add prestige to our national sense of self.

How do you get a corporation to do it though? Let the government offer up a $20 billion prize to whomever does it first. The ideas is actually rather sound, historically and its the way Newt seems to envision a lot of things. He has mentioned the idea before several times but I believe it’s an interesting contrast to some of his fellow Republican’s and especially Democrat’s ideals about government.

Like him or not it would be interesting to have Gingrich debating alongside the other candidates.