Speaking Wristonese

Forbes' Digital Rules quotes banker extraordinaire Walter Wriston, who "said capital (meaning both money and ideas), when freed to travel at the speed of light, 'will go where it is wanted, stay where it is well-treated.'" DR goes on to say that "the reason for bringing up Walter Wriston and the late, great 25-year boom of technology, entrepreneurship and investment that was built on Wriston's Law is--very sad to say--that America has reversed course," and that "Nothing I see coming out of Washington is helping matters. Quite the opposite. Capital and merit are under attack."

At a couple of recent health care conferences, I heard Billy Tauzin, CEO of Phrma, tell the assembled lobbyists and political figures how many nations think biotech and pharmaceutical research and production are just great, and would love to have his members re-locate.

I thought both times that the audience members seemed a bit tone deaf. They must not have been  Wristonese speakers.

Nor is Congress, if the WSJ is right, in "Big Pharma Gets Played" (July 16) (subscription):

House Democrats . . . released a health-care bill that pocketed the industry concessions for senior drug coverage, and also imposed the very price controls Mr. Tauzin thought he'd shelved. These mandatory "rebates" on drugs for seniors would cost the industry $50 billion more over a decade than the $80 billion the industry promised Mr. Baucus. . . . In case this isn't enough of a doublecross, Senate Democrats are also considering hefty new taxes on health insurance and . . . pharmaceutical companies. Price tag: $100 billion.

The oldest business (or taxation) model in the world is to find some immobile capital and steal it. But in an age in which capital is intellectual, that won't work. Maybe a good business would be to open a  language school in the pharma belt of New Jersey to teach Mandarin and Cantonese. China already knows Wristonese.