Politics & Power Quote by Jim DeMint

DeMint’s line is a tidy piece of market-faith rhetoric: it turns a sprawling, infrastructure-shaped problem into a shopping preference and then treats that preference as sufficient policy. The first sentence flatters the consumer as a rational actor who, faced with high gas prices, will simply “demand and buy” efficiency. It’s a confidence trick in miniature, swapping structural constraints for individual agency. Most Americans don’t buy cars the way they buy cereal; they buy what’s available, affordable, financed, and culturally legible, in a market where manufacturers, dealers, and long product cycles set the menu. By framing fuel economy as purely demand-driven, DeMint quietly absolves automakers and lawmakers alike of responsibility for shaping that menu.

The second sentence does the real political work: “freedom” becomes the shield that blocks regulation, and “government” is cast as the meddler. The subtext is not just anti-regulatory; it’s pro-status quo. Regulations that raise fleet efficiency standards don’t merely constrain choices, they force industry investment, accelerate innovation, and prevent collective costs (pollution, health impacts, energy insecurity) from being dumped back onto the public. DeMint’s formulation omits those externalities because acknowledging them would justify exactly the rules he’s trying to discredit.

Context matters: this is a conservative argument that peaked during recurring gasoline price shocks and climate-policy fights, when “let the market handle it” was a way to oppose fuel-economy mandates without sounding pro-guzzler. It’s less a prediction about consumer behavior than a moral claim: that any coordinated solution is automatically suspect, even when the market’s incentives arrive too late.