[_delirium]

In my experience, the kinds of people who spend the most time on minimizing taxes are precisely the opposite of productive members of society: heirs and heiresses with large assets and passive incomes, but not much real capacity for earning income through their own labors. You generally see complex tax-avoidance trust structures in these "old-money" families much more than you see them in new-money families. For them, it's a rational decision, because the opportunity cost of spending a bunch of time/effort on tax avoidance is low: they aren't wasting time that they would otherwise have put to more productive uses.