Everyone likes to complain about the prices Americans pay for prescription drugs, with the political blame falling mostly on the supposedly price-gouging drug companies. But it's worth considering the role European socialism plays in the prices Americans pay for their medicines, and how the drug companies have begun to fight back.

That's right. European price controls on drugs have for years made the Continent a free rider on America's (mostly) free market in prescription drugs. Europe can't shake the habit of living off U.S.-funded research. The average cost of creating a new drug today is more than $800 million, especially after government approval delays. Somehow drug makers have to make those costs back, not to mention with a profit, and the way the drug companies do it is by charging what the market will bear for drug sales in the U.S.

In socialist Europe, by contrast, governments usually act as monopsonist price setters. (A monopsony market is one in which there is only one buyer for a commodity or service.) For political reasons, governments force down prices, which means that European consumers pay less but also that European countries are in effect refusing to pay their fair share of drug R&D costs. In other words, American consumers are financing the drug innovations that couldn't be developed as quickly, if at all, at European prices.

The news is that the pharmaceutical industry, or parts of it, are deciding not to take it anymore. Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell recently told the French government that unless the government re-evaluates its pricing policies, Pfizer might not sell certain drugs in France at all. Drug prices in France average just 42% of their U.S. level, and Pfizer makes such popular medicines as Lipitor (for cholesterol) and Viagra (for you know what). A second company, AstraZeneca, has said publicly that it may also get out of certain European markets if it can't get better prices.

This new assertiveness is a marked change of strategy for the drug makers. Although drug companies long have fought quietly for the best prices they could wheedle out of Europe's health-care bureaucracies, they had resigned themselves to miser's pay. As long as U.S. consumers paid back their fixed costs, some revenue from Europe looked better to drug makers than nothing. So the companies let the socialists push them around.

But now drug makers are realizing that even the American market won't be able to single-handedly fund the world's drug research forever. U.S. consumers are starting to rebel, and U.S. politicians want to make drug purchases part of Medicare's own price-control bureaucracy. Throw in the fact that drug research and regulatory costs are rising fast -- total industry R&D spending last year is expected to be about $30 billion -- and something's got to give.

It's fair to wonder if the drug companies will stick to their new pricing convictions, of course. This is, after all, the same industry that was recently routed in the court of public opinion over the pricing of HIV-AIDS drugs in Africa, even though its research made the therapies possible and it was already giving much of its product away. They're not masters of public relations.

But the companies do have some leverage, namely therapies that Europeans want. Drug companies have every right to drop out of markets in which their products can't make an adequate return. And they arguably have a truth-in-advertising obligation to show consumers that the price of socialism is fewer life-easing and life-saving products.

Most Europeans only dimly realize that they once had their own mighty drug industry. But price controls have done it great damage and caused the companies to shift their research dollars into the U.S. The pharmaceutical industry is doing a public service by reminding Europeans that there's no such thing as a free drug.