A counterpoint: I moved to France with my family this year, and work as a self-employed developer while bootstrapping my own company. - our landlord wanted to

A counterpoint: I moved to France with my family this year, and work as a self-employed developer while bootstrapping my own company. - our landlord wanted to see a tax return from the previous year and three months' bank statements. No guarantee required. Our tenancy is for three years, before which the landlord cannot terminate it, but we can with 3 months' notice at any time. Renting was easy and cheap, and comes with a great deal of security. - our new bank wanted a LOT of information about us, and some 70 pages of documentation. But now it's set up I can email or phone them and get an instant response from someone that knows me and my family (and speaks fluent English to boot). Their online systems are considerably better than my previous UK bank's. - Registering for self-employment was entirely online and took 20 minutes. - I fill out a social security return quarterly, which takes ~45 seconds, and all of the calculations are handled for me. - We pay more tax than in the UK. But the state also pays for 85% of our childcare costs, and credits half of the remainder against our income tax bill. - When I needed to check on our residence tax status, I rolled up at our local tax office where I was seen within 2 minutes by a friendly official who had immediately called all our details up on his computer, showed me what I needed to know and told me everything was in hand. (It was.) It's not perfect. Being an employer is seriously not fun. Self-employment has its issues too. But it seems to be getting better, and by and large the systems work. (Probably because there are huge numbers of people running them.)