An Enterprising Life
Andel, Jay Van
The Amway Way: Seeking the Profit of Many very rich, but as he writes in An Enterprising Life, his "greatest pleasure comes not from the endless acquisition of material things but from creating...
...But things do change, and the skepticism about business and businessmen has given way to at least a grudging respect...
...For years, for example, Amway sold vitamins in boxes...
...As a child in Grand Rapids, Van Andel recalls, he once found a dime in an alley...
...For years he has contributed to charities, hospitals, and schools, and, now at 74, he has funded what likely will be his most enduring legacy, the Van Andel Institute in Grand Rapids, one of the largest private philanthropic operations in the history of medical research...
...The latches cost 5o cents apiece, and since Amway sold millions of boxes each year, that meant millions of dollars in extra costs...
...The Michigan-based direct-sales giant started as a modest venture selling liquid soap, and is now a $7-billion consumer-products company with some 3 million distributors in 8o countries...
...Similarly a former head of General Motors once said that what's good for GM was good for America, and while no doubt that was true, he was pilloried in the press for saying it...
...It also writes i4,000 paychecks every week...
...Apparently no one had, and so he was allowed to keep it...
...Capitalism...
...tional morals are not at odds with one another—they're perfectly compatible, regardless of what some critics say...
...a leftist government apparently had taken offense at Amway's built-in conservatism...
...Elite opinion now has to recognize that an entrepreneur may make the world a better place than it was when he found it...
...We began to suspect," Van Andel writes, again very mildly, "that the animosity Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau had toward business, and American business in particular, might be filtering through to this situation...
...What is the basic tenet of capitalism...
...And almost certainly it was...
...It also threatened Van Andel, DeVos, and two Amway vice-presidents with extradition...
...That given a reasonable amount of effort, one can make a very nice living being an Amway rep...
...They make the rules, he says, and business must follow them...
...Guess what political-philosophical system most (if not all of them) espouse...
...B ut worst of all was the day the Mounties raided Amway headquarters in Canada, and the Canadian government brought criminal charges, accusing Amway of "defrauding" it of more than $28 million in tariffs...
...However fashionable (and politically expedient) it has now become to flaunt religious belief, the faith here lives and pulsates...
...Indeed he says he and DeVos sought to run Amway "according to biblical principles of integrity, faithfulness and truthfulness," and that they knew they "were dependent on God for the ability to do what was right" Corporate meetings always opened with prayer, and the two founders "were quietly breathing prayers" all during the meetings...
...Without God's grace," Van Andel writes, "Amway would never have been successful...
...There is nothing voluntary, nothing beneficial," he writes, "about government regulation...
...It is also a tribute to Van Andel that you believe him here, too...
...That given a modicum of freedom one can accomplish just about anything one wants to accomplish...
...Consider as a principal example Jay Van Andel, who, with his life-long friend Rich DeVos, began Amway...
...And what does Amway preach...
...The Amway Way: Seeking the Profit of Many very rich, but as he writes in An Enterprising Life, his "greatest pleasure comes not from the endless acquisition of material things but from creating wealth and giving it away...
...In the last sentence of An Enterprising Life, Van Andel says he hopes that he somehow has made other people's lives a little better, and you are quite sure that he has...
...Van Andel, the son of Dutch immigrants, was brought up in the Christian Reform Church, a relatively strict denomination that traces itself to John Calvin, and takes old-fashioned values seriously...
...When regulators attempt to eradicate some small hazard, they invariably create another...
...There were other difficulties, too...
...Meanwhile Van Andel wants us to know that the "freeenterprise system and tradiAn Enterprising Life: An Autobiography Jay Van Andel HarperBusiness / 234 pages $24 REVIEWED BY John Corry N o matter how great its contribution to our general well-being, business has not always done well in the court of elite opinion...
...As a Canadian journalist wrote: "Some Amway people are, dare I say it, very successful...
...Although he never sounds shrill in his judgments, it is clear that bureaucrats often have made him, say, lose patience...
...In 1975, the Federal Trade Commission charged that Amway was a gigantic pyramid scheme "doomed to failure...
...It is a tribute to Van Andel here that you believe this...
...All this has made Van Andel JOHN CORRY is TAS's senior correspondent...
...Eventually, of course, the Canadian unpleasantness was settled, and in the years to come Van Andel would do a good deal better, comparatively speaking, than Trudeau...
...His mother, Van Andel writes, simply wanted to teach him to respect other people's property...
...His mother then told him to go door to door to ask if anyone had lost it...
...Perhaps it is almost redundant now to note that Van Andel is a conservative, and has scant use either for federal bureaucrats, or the political culture that spawns them...
...Moreover, elderly Amway customers who suffered from crippling 82 October 1998 • The American Spectator diseases were unable to pry open the latches, although childproof or not, it seems, very young children could...
...In fact, it was not a pyramid scheme, and it would go on to colossal success, but it cost Amway four years of Washington hearings (they were "quite interesting," Van Andel says mildly), with tens of thousands of documents and millions in legal fees to prove it...
...Then the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered it to put childproof latches on the boxes...
...Calvin Coolidge was correct when he said the principal business of America was business, although a generation or so of presidential historians would later decide his sensible dictum was suspect, and possibly even immoral...
...Van Andel calls this a splendid example of the Law of Unintended Consequences...
Vol. 31 • October 1998 • No. 10
