If it ain’t broke, break it.

This is Joe Biden’s guiding principle. He took President Donald J. Trump’s much-tighter southern border and ripped it as wide open as a gutted trout’s belly. Biden turned Trump’s energy independence into begging Iran and Venezuela to pump more oil. He also devolved Trump’s peace in the Middle East into a five-front Arab war on Israel and let the Houthi terrorists convert the Red Sea into a shooting gallery.

And for his next trick, Biden wants to impersonate a Latin autocrat.

On December 7, a date that shall live in infamy, Biden’s Commerce Department proposed a mechanism to invoke the so-called “march-in” clause of 1980’s bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act. This would empower Uncle Sam to capture and control patents that fully or partially were funded with federal research grants, if Washington bureaucrats disliked the market prices or rollout speeds of their ensuing technologies.

As usual, Biden hopes to capsize the efficient, productive status quo. Since senators Birch Bayh (D -Indiana) and Bob Dole (R – Kansas) secured this legislation, universities and other institutions have owned the patents that emerged from federally funded research. Many then license these patents to companies and entrepreneurs who nurture them into goods and services. (Officially this law is the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act of 1980.)

“Since its passage more than 40........

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