There's a famous scene in Atlas Shrugged in which a destitute man named Jeff Allen tells Dagny Taggart how the principles of socialism gradually brought the flourishing factory he'd worked at to ruin.

The scene came to mind in reviewing a much hyped proposal from the left wing of the House Democrats aimed at lowering drug prices.  Critics accuse Ayn Rand of caricature – her characters are unbelievable, absurd, they say, but the cartoons have a way of showing up in the newspaper!

Allen, in the book, recounts how the thriving Twentieth Century Motor Company factory had been triumphantly transformed according to Marx's famous first principle: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Workers' wages, based on need, would be determined by a company-wide vote twice a year.  "It turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother's."

Meanwhile, as production quickly fell, the factory's most capable workers, with an abundance of ability, were assigned ever longer working hours.  "The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability.  Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off."

As the process for assessing "need" became more politicized, centralized, and vicious, production quality and speed continued to plummet.  The factory's leaders, heirs of the since deceased entrepreneur who built it, began "demanding that businessmen place orders with us, not because our motors were good, but because we needed the orders so badly."

Four miserable years after the experiment began, the factory closed in bankruptcy.  Its designers blamed a "selfish, greedy world" that wouldn't accept their "noble ideal" – "human nature was not good enough for it."

Now, here's The Nation breathlessly describing the House socialists' new plan: the bill, Richard Eskow writes, "has the potential to start a new national conversation about the federal government’s relationship to intellectual property, monopoly power, and human needs."

The gist is this: if an unelected government official decides there is sufficient need, the patent for a new drug can be voided.

Like all good left-wing ideas, snatching intellectual property from companies that spent billions of dollars inventing new, life-saving medicines is given an Orwellian title, the "Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act."  More competition!  Who doesn't like that?

According to the bill text, the secretary of Health and Human Services is to base his needs assessment on factors including:

•  the associated financial burdens on patients that utilize such drug
•  the associated unmet patient need for such drug

The first clause is self-defeating: the more a drug benefits the poor (those with "financial burdens"), the more likely the government will strip the patent.  What could go wrong?  It creates an incentive not to bring drugs to market for the very people the law purports to help.

The second clause, besides its risible ambiguity, cuts at the core profit motive that drives the vast majority of drug innovation.

Entrepreneurs are trying to identify, and solve, the areas with the most possible "unmet patient need" – after all, the more "unmet patient need" a drug meets, the more profit it can make, generally speaking.

"Unmet patient need" is exactly the thing we want drug companies to target!  Instead, it's being turned into a liability – much the way ability became a liability at the Twentieth Century Motors Factory.  This bill contains the seeds of its own destruction.

So, socialists, here's your "national conversation" about intellectual property and human needs.  Do you want new medicines?  Arbitrarily looting intellectual property from people who are putting incredible capital and effort on the line to bring those drugs to the market in the first place would be utterly ruinous.  

Chris Salcedo is a nationally recognized radio talk show host heard on WBAP in Dallas, Texas and KSEV in Houston Texas, is the author of the Ayn Rand-style novel Liberty Rises and the executive director of The Conservative Hispanic Society.