Life's Pleasures Quote by Kenneth Lay

Lay’s line has the soothing cadence of a civics textbook, and that’s the point. By calling energy “commodities” the way food is a commodity, he tries to naturalize a radical shift: electricity and gas stop being public utilities with civic obligations and become tradable instruments with “buyers and sellers” like pork bellies. The repetition does quiet work, too. “Buyers and sellers” sounds neutral, almost wholesome, as if markets are simply the weather. Agency disappears; responsibility blurs.

The context matters because Kenneth Lay wasn’t offering an economic primer from the sidelines. As Enron’s boss during the 1990s deregulation boom, he had a stake in persuading regulators and the public that energy trading was not speculation but modern efficiency. The rhetorical move is ideological laundering: swap moral vocabulary (reliability, affordability, public need) for market vocabulary (liquidity, price discovery, commodities). Once energy is framed as just another thing, the trading floor becomes an inevitable solution rather than a political choice.

The subtext is a bet on amnesia. Food is a commodity, yes, but it’s also tightly regulated, subsidized, and politically explosive when prices spike. Lay borrows the familiarity of the grocery aisle to make energy markets feel similarly mundane, even as the consequences of manipulation in California-era crises showed how non-mundane electricity really is: you can’t “opt out” of heat or light when the market misbehaves.

It’s corporate realism dressed as common sense: if energy is ordinary, then extraordinary profits can look ordinary too.