Newt has not “demonized profits,” and in fact if you had actually read his proposal, you would know that there’s plenty of profit in it for private companies. The moon will not only eventually provide a station for further space exploration, but has a lot of mineral wealth of its own, particularly rare minerals, and also provides a gravity-free environment that has all sorts of uses, ranging from manufacturing to (yes) therapeutic.
The function of NASA in Newt’s plan would be administrative, and NASA would be responsible for coordinating plans, running bidding, making sure regulatory measures don’t put a stop to the whole thing, etc. And of course, keeping the Chinese at bay.
One of the flaws in the corn ethanol idea was that it could not be piped and so it had to be trucked to the gas stations because of it's high water content, which gasoline is relatively free from. Well having to truck ethanol pretty much wiped out any net energy that the corn might have produced as an energy source making us MORE dependent on oil not less.
Well trucking ‘rare minerals’ from the moon to the earth is going to be a bit more expensive than trucking ethanol to the pumps, like a million times+ or more, slowing down the recuping of that $500B/$1T or so from all those ‘profits’
Newt is a idea guy for sure, unfortunately many of them are fun sounding clunkers. Ethanol was a huge disaster but all it took was selling it to a few gullable voters to make us slaves to it.