Working People : Entrepreneur’s Diary: What Happened to “Freedom and Prosperity”?

When Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan announced Friday that the city planned to streamline permitting and regulations for small businesses, he was speaking to people like Noel Anenberg, author of the ‘Entrepreneur’s Diary’ at right. Anenberg, who has been in business in Los Angeles for 20 years, wrote to express his frustrations with both the urban perils surrounding his Mr. Sippee restaurant/gas station near the L. A. Convention Center and the rigidity of city regulations.

5:30 a.m.: Woke up feeling excited for the first time in months. Much of the business lost during the riots has returned and it seems as though the earth has stopped shaking.

7:15: Leave the house. Drop my son at golf camp.

7:35: Call the store manager to ensure the premises are squared away.

8:05: Harbor Freeway is backed up so I take the Alvarado exit and drive south toward Olympic. The area around MacArthur Park is occupied by prostitutes, addicts and alcoholics. Some sit at the foot of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s statue, making me wonder whether this was the “freedom” he fought for.

8:20: Turn off Olympic and head to our store, which shines fresh white and orange in the early morning sun. A deranged woman is standing across the street in a vacant property adjacent to the freeway off-ramp. Her close cropped sandy brown hair is matted down, her skin is gray. Her black dress is pulled up over her hips. She stares anxiously into nowhere. As many motorists pass she squats and defecates. My excitement disappears. Despite all the regulatory demands it places on business, Los Angeles is failing to provide an environment conducive to business.

8:25: Enter the store. A couple of Central Division cops are having a soda. After apologizing for a distasteful interruption, I ask them to do something about the deranged lady who paces around the vacant lot. They tell me that if she exposes herself again, they’ll give her a “5150,” which is a 72-hour psychiatric lockup.

10:05: Panhandlers and window washers begin appearing. They usually work through lunch, take the afternoon off, then return for an evening shift. The manager reports that teams of window washers have been appearing at night, ganging up on a car to intimidate the driver into giving them money. I telephone the police and am told to call the dispatcher the next time they appear. I know it takes at least an hour for a patrol car to arrive, which is of no use. Cannot afford private security.

11:15: Meet with a salesman of underground fuel tanks. He tells me his system is allowed in Los Angeles County, the State of California and the rest of the United States but not in the City of Los Angeles. This means more small business will close. He quotes Peter Ueberroth, who called California a “highly efficient job-killing machine.” I say Los Angeles is even more efficient.

12:30 p.m.: Customers line up for lunch. While the manager and I discuss a change in the menu, two gangbangers confront us. The one who speaks has a shaved head, bulging biceps, glazed eyes and a tattoo of a razor-thin spiked chain at the nape of his neck. My adrenalin starts pumping. He complains about a price. The manager, who is quite the psychologist, smiles broadly, thanks him for his comments and shows him the exit.

1:15: An inspector from the Bureau of Community Safety, which inspects mechanical and electrical building components, stops in. He has been a regular customer for several years. Today he cites us for operating our chicken rotisserie without a hood. I explain that we have operated it that way for nine years and that it’s allowed to operate that way in every other county of the state. He tells me that tests run in other jurisdictions are null and void in this city, that we will have to submit the equipment for testing in the L.A. lab and that it will take a year or more to get the results.

5:30: Driving home, I think about my great-grandfather Isaac, who lived in small shtetl in Prussia. The Prussian army gave us our name, Anenberg (“of the mountain”) because he lived near a mountain and because the Prussians wanted the peasants to have last names so that they could be conscripted and taxed to feed the Prussian military machine. He fled to Germany, then immigrated to New York, where he sold vegetables from a cart. My grandfather and father migrated to California to build a life of freedom and prosperity. But now, it seems, the prosperous future they sought, and that of my children, is being destroyed by armies of liberal politicians and petty regulators. These people can recite the Constitution but care not one whit that they are destroying our precious economic freedom.

Major revolution in thought and action is needed if this city, which has provided so much, is to thrive once again.

-- Noel Anenberg, Los Angeles