> Should one live in a high tax high social safety net country while paying tax to a low tax low social safety net country or not paying tax at all?
My friend, if these systems were just about aligning the incentives for workers and benefits and taxes, and otherwise tried to be understanding about human foibles, then people wouldn't point to immigration systems around the world as a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Just to pick an example — chosen for my familiarity, wholly outside of and unrelated to Brexit — the UK's Windrush scandal involved the bureaucracy actively destroying old records of immigration from British overseas possessions (particularly the Caribbean), then deciding years later to go after people who had been living in the country for decades — demanding they supply exhaustive documentation of their legal immigration, and their life and activities in the intervening time. Rest assured that this was a fully adversarial process! They did not offer to help anyone so affected gather these documents, or to make their case.
And later, in another unrelated scandal, the Home Office decided to react to an English-examination cheating scandal by analyzing everyone's examination results with some opaque computerized process, using the results to declare something like 97% of them as invalid cheaters — and sending nastygrams to about 9,700 university students, calling them dirty cheaters and demanding they leave country. Many of them did, and they forcibly removed others. Notably, they did not ask for them to re-sit the exam. They did not care about the lives ruined.
Of course the matter of the .eu domain is absolutely nothing compared to the daily nightmare that is "visas," but the same devotion to rules and insensitivity to the costs of policy runs through the matter. They could have grandfathered in existing domains, at least a little bit longer. I know that if I had a website and I had to move domains, I would want to run web and email forwarding for more than one year. If they wanted to be particular about just having the forwarding, they could have audited the sites to make sure that they were just redirects, and charged for the privilege. They didn't. There's no sane reason that couldn't happen except to preserve The Rules — but these rules simply are not a valuable end in and of themselves, despite the laud and honor they have received in this thread.