Your Daily Newt: On Speed Limits and the Principles of Freedom

Newt Gingrich laughs at a campaign stop in South Carolina.Jeff Siner/Charlotte Observer/ZumaPress.com

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As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.

According to Newt Gingrich, two things inspired Newt Gingrich to become a revolutionary. The first was his experience with a youth literacy program called Earning by Learning, which taught him that educational outcomes could be improved if we started offering students cash incentives (Earning by Learning also offered a lot of money to Gingrich’s former aide and biographer Mel Steely). The second, he told an audience at DC’s Mayflower Hotel in 1995, was speed limit signs:

As you know in Germany, on the autobahn, there’s no speed limit, you can go literally any speed you want to. Many Americans rent a car, they’re doing 100, a Mercedes goes by at 120, they pull over to the side of the road and cry. They never fully recover from the experience.  If tomorrow morning the Bundestag adopted a 100 kilometer or 62 mile-per-hour speed limit, virtually every German would obey it the next day. And the next election they would massacre the current generation of politicians and they would elect the No Speed Limit Party.

Now I’m always cautious about this because I don’t want to offend anybody in the audience, but my understanding is that the American cultural response to the challenge of speed limits is substantially different from the German cultural response: In most of America, the speed limit is the benchmark of opportunity…I want to make a point here. This to me was the moment, one of the two moments I became a revolutionary.”

After a brief digression into a discussion of disciplinary pratices within the 18th-century British army, Gingrich returned to signage: “A country in which virtually every citizen drives over the speed limit is impossible to lead by bureaucratic regulation,” he said. “By definition, this is why the health plan last year was so crazy. By definition, a nation driven by incentives will wake up in the morning and say ‘How do I get around the rule? What can my lawyer find for me? Is there a consultant who knows the loopholes?'” Given that Gingrich rose to power in the GOP by exploiting loopholes in the tax code to use charities for political ends, we suppose he probably does have point.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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