How is it that, a little over three years after the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, people aren't laughing Newt Gingrich out of the room for proposing this?

Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich wants to give younger workers the option to choose private retirement accounts as an alternative to Social Security.

"It would be a voluntary choice. Keep the current system if you want to, or have a savings account," Gingrich said Monday at Rivier College in Nashua....Under the plan, the federal government would regulate the personal accounts run by private firms to ensure the portfolios were diversified so one company or sector couldn't take down the entire system. Government approved firms then would compete for consumers, who could move their money among accounts based on the funds' performance.

This plan sounds like a nightmare: Less government regulation of business! Except for when there's more government regulation of business! Take government out of our retirements! Except for when they're there to make sure business doesn't sink our retirements! This is pure, old-school Gingrich, a ghastly Frankenstein of big and small government that struggles to create a solution that is more complicated than the problem it's trying to solve.