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The Federalist Papers Communism never delivered a classless society. It delivered two classes: the people who run the state, and everyone else.Here's how the slide usually starts. Politicians promise free health care, free college, free everything, and say the rich will pay for it. It sounds fair. Nobody likes the idea of billionaires skating by while working families struggle.But the rich are not stuck in place. They have lawyers, accountants and moving vans. When the tax bill gets punishing, they leave, or they buy their way into the government that writes the rules.The money still has to come from somewhere. So it comes from the people who can't leave. The small business owner. The electrician. The family with a paid-off house and a modest retirement account. That's the middle class, and it's the one class a big government can always find.Look at Venezuela. It sits on the largest proven oil reserves on earth, and nearly 8 million people have fled. Look at Cuba, where families have lived on government ration books since the early 1960s. The party bosses never missed a meal.Now look at what voters across Latin America just did. Bolivia ended nearly 20 years of socialist rule. Chile elected José Antonio Kast over a Communist Party candidate. Argentina handed Javier Milei a bigger mandate. This year, Colombia and Peru both rejected the left's candidates. People who lived through the experiment are voting their way out of it.Europe is learning the same lesson more slowly. Britain scrapped its non-dom tax status and was projected to lose more millionaires than any country on earth. France spent the past year debating a wealth tax with a five-year exit penalty attached.When a government starts drafting penalties to keep its taxpayers from leaving, the policy has already failed.Democrats keep promising that this time, in America, it will be different. The rest of the world is telling us it won't be.If the wealthy can always pack up and leave, who do you think ends up paying for all the "free" stuff?