In 1995, shortly after becoming Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich mulled a radical overhaul of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As he put it to a room full of health insurers, “Maybe we’ll take out FDA.”

What made Newt likable to advocates of freedom is sadly no longer part of his schtick. Here’s how Andrew Stiles reports on Newt’s appearance on Meet the Press yesterday:

“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said when asked about [House Budget Committee chairman Paul] Ryan’s [R‑WI] plan to transition to a “premium support” model for Medicare. “I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.”

As far as an alternative, Gingrich trotted out the same appeal employed by Obama/​Reid/​Pelosi — for a “national conversation” on how to “improve” Medicare, and promised to eliminate ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ etc.

“I think what you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options,” Gingrich said. Ryan’s plan was simply “too big a jump.”

He even went so far as to compare it the Obama health-care plan. “I’m against Obamacare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.”

If you close your eyes, it’s like listening to The Princess Bride. Medicare and Medicaid are nothing if not social engineering. So by Newt’s logic, we should get rid of them. But Newt also says that radical change is bad, which means we can’t. That leaves incremental changes. But incremental changes to massive social-engineering experiments are themselves social engineering, so we clearly cannot make incremental changes, either. ObamaCare is both social engineering and radical change. Again by Newt’s logic, ObamaCare is bad, and we must get rid of it, but we can’t. Truly, he has a dizzying intellect.

Newt’s objection to Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms is no less incoherent. It appears to be that the reforms approved by the House would eliminate the traditional Medicare program as an option for Americans who enroll after 2021. So far as I can tell, Newt’s opposition to this feature is consistent with his past positions on Medicare reform. He wants to let people stay in traditional Medicare if that’s what they prefer, and would have traditional Medicare compete against private insurance companies for Medicare enrollees.

But it is completely inconsistent with Newt’s opposition to President Obama’s call for a so-called “public option” to compete with private insurance companies. In 2009, Newt told Good Morning America:

I guarantee you the language they draft for the public plan will give it huge advantages over the private sector or it won’t work…what they will do is rig the game…I mean, anybody who’s watched this Congress who believes that this Congress is going to design a fair, neutral playing field I think would be totally out of touch with reality.

Newt may not realize this, but he was actually explaining why his preferred Medicare reforms would fail: Congress would rig the game to protect the “public option” that Congress offers to seniors — i.e., traditional Medicare. House Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, rather bravely stuck to their guns when they kept a “public option” out of their proposed Medicare reforms. Ryan is offering Republicans credibility and success. By his own admission, Newt is offering them failure.

What’s up with Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich? Does the Republican presidential nomination race have some sort of prize for insincerity or incoherence that I don’t know about?

Finally, Newt endorsed a “variation of the individual mandate” (tell me again why he opposes ObamaCare?) and said there is “a way to do it that make most libertarians relatively happy.” He must have meant to say leftists rather than libertarians. Regardless, I invite Newt to come to the Cato Institute so he can explain to people who actually care about freedom just how happy he’s going to make us.