The American Dream Still Worth Pursuing
Americans celebrate this Fourth of July weekend with concerns about increasing commitments in dangerous places around the world.
In developing nations from the Middle East to Africa, America is trying to spread a message of economic freedom -- independent business development, greater involvement of women -- with missionary zeal.
Is that wise policy? Sure it is. The country in which 12 million people own their own businesses is only doing what comes naturally, preaching the example of its own success.
It is easy, of course, to be cynical about all that is wrong on the home front: a flaccid economy, income inequality, scandal on Wall Street and in the executive suite. But to focus only on the negative is to forget that there also is a lot right with America.
The economic freedom that the nation offers is of a special kind. It is the freedom to work hard and to be your own boss. It is a freedom that changes lives, especially for people who come from places where owning a business is not easy or is altogether impossible.
Sina Yashar owned a textile firm in Tehran a quarter-century ago.
“It was a good world,” he recalls. “We had Muslim customers, Muslim suppliers. We dealt every day with each other.” But in 1979, the Iranian revolution brought in Ayatollah Khomeini and rule by the mullahs. Freedom was lost.
“We are Jewish,” Yashar explains. “I thought this was not a place for me to stay.”
So with his wife, three sons and two daughters, he came to Los Angeles -- “this land of milk and honey,” Yashar calls it -- and bought Dixlin Plastics, a company that made parts for industrial machinery.
That sufficed until 1983, when his sons finished their education. At that point, Yashar and his oldest boys, Kaye and David, went into the door hardware business, distributing knobs and handles, hinges and locks to builders’ suppliers.
Their company, Cal-Royal, got its first big break from a quintessentially American habit: folks suing each other.
“Motel 6 was sued because somebody had posed as a pizza deliverer, entered a motel and assaulted a guest,” recounts Kaye. “So the chain needed peepholes in all the doors. We supplied the peepholes.”
Today, Cal-Royal employs 52 at warehouse facilities in the City of Commerce and works through 30 sales agencies around the country. Revenue, the family says cagily, is more than $10 million, less than $50 million.
To the Yashars, American freedom means one thing: work, work, work.
“This is a very competitive economy,” says Kaye, who describes himself as “president, janitor, laborer and other jobs” at Cal-Royal. “You have freedom to blow the business if you’re not on top of things all the time.”
Over in North Hollywood, Varuzhan Ghazaryan knows precisely what the Yashars mean.
His business is called Glassston, a two-person operation that churns out glass vases and perfume bottles for the Armenian wedding gift market. Back in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, Ghazaryan would have no hope of owning his own enterprise.
For one thing, governing authorities even in independent post-Soviet Armenia don’t allow just anybody to go into business. And even if they did, “you couldn’t get the financing,” Ghazaryan says through a translator.
But seven years ago, when he was 36, Ghazaryan won a lottery in Yerevan allowing him to obtain resident alien status -- a treasured “green card” -- in the United States. So he came here and set up his glass-blowing shop. He has been aided by a $10,000 loan from Bank of America, backed partly by the Small Business Administration.
His dreams are big: “I hope my business grows,” Ghazaryan says, “and in five years I will employ more people here.”
In 1975, nobody had hope of owning a business in Vietnam. That was when K.V. Nguyen and her husband, Hung, came to the United States. Both were 24 years old, denizens of the refugee center at Camp Pendleton.
In the years that followed, they earned high school equivalency degrees. Hung went on to college and became an engineer, and the couple landed jobs at Extron Electronics in Anaheim.
“But we needed money to sponsor my husband’s family here from Vietnam,” says K.V. “So I went to Extron and asked them for extra work that we could do at home.”
The Nguyens toiled in their garage assembling electronic components. Gradually, they undertook work for others and expanded the operation. Today, they own Micro Analog Corp. in La Verne. The company employs about 170 people and takes in $10 million a year providing contract manufacturing services for electronics and computer firms.
Meanwhile, the Nguyens return often to Vietnam to rescue street children by putting them in school and financing their educations.
In recent years, Vietnam has opened up its own economy and is seeking investment. Would the Nguyens consider launching a business there? In their minds, the answer largely boils down to how much freedom their homeland would really offer.
“Oh,” says K.V., “on Vietnam, I don’t know. On so many things -- on the role of women -- they have no credibility.”
Economic freedom is among the oldest of American virtues.
In 1789, when England forbade skilled workmen to emigrate or early manufacturers to let drawings of their production processes out of the country, a young machinist named Samuel Slater was attracted by incentives from the then-fledgling United States. So he secretly left England and endured 66 days on the Atlantic.
He arrived in Rhode Island, where he obtained financial backing from industrialist Moses Brown (for whom Brown University is named). Slater then built from memory copies of the cotton-spinning frames he had worked on in England. In so doing, Slater gave birth to the U.S. textile industry.
Several years ago, a Swiss banker noted that America is the only true meritocracy in the history of the world. As the Fourth of July comes and goes, it is an observation worth remembering -- and celebrating.
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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.
