In Europe, you don't leave the rich to their own benevolence. It's much worse. By and large, European countries have laws forbidding the rich from donating to

In Europe, you don't leave the rich to their own benevolence. It's much worse. By and large, European countries have laws forbidding the rich from donating too much of their money to charity, especially upon their deaths. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_heirship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_heirship for a pretty bare-bones description of the setup. https://www.cesifo-group.de/ifoHome/facts/DICE/Public-Sector/Public-Finance/Taxes/Succession-law-in-Europe-inheritance-tax/fileBinary/Succession-law-in-Europe-inheritance-tax.pdf https://www.cesifo-group.de/ifoHome/facts/DICE/Public-Sector... has more details by country; see the "Restrictions on the freedom to dispose of one’s succession by will" section. Under these laws, heirs have been able to claw back donations made before death (including many years before death), in addition to ones made in the will. Note that if you accept the premise of the forced heirship laws, this is an obvious consequence; otherwise people will just structure their finances to make most of the donations they want before they die. Anyway, the upshot is that the European legal system takes great pains to make sure that currently wealthy families stay wealthy instead of managing to give the money away. It's just not talked about much, and I suspect many people don't really know about it.