The European upper class doesn't generally pay taxes, and they are more of internationalists than you are thinking. They move around enough and have their home base somewhere like Monaco so they don't participate at all in the welfare systems. European welfare systems redistribute huge amounts of money from the middle class to the poor, not from the rich.
In other words, the European welfare systems are actually a great tool of theirs to keep the competition down: if you're taxing the upper-middle-class workers at a ~50% rate, they need to out-earn you 2:1 to build wealth at the same rate.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just that even with all that "the common people" still get more from the state than in the US, that's at least my feeling.
In other words, the European welfare systems are actually a great tool of theirs to keep the competition down: if you're taxing the upper-middle-class workers at a ~50% rate, they need to out-earn you 2:1 to build wealth at the same rate.