Every revolution promises to bury an old elite. Almost none of them promise, out loud, to build a new one. But that is what happened in Venezuela after 1999 and in Zimbabwe after 2000, and the pattern is clear enough, and repeated enough, that it deserves a name more precise than "corruption" or "failed socialism." The sociologist Vilfredo Pareto had a term for it a century ago: the circulation of elites. Not the abolition of a ruling class, but its replacement — one hierarchy swapped for another, with the human cost of the transition borne almost entirely by the people who were promised liberation from it. This is not an argument against redistribution as such, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Land reform has worked. Wealth taxes have funded functioning welfare states. The question this history actually raises is narrower and more useful: what determines whether a redistribution campaign produces a broader, more indep...