One of the things you realise after living here for about a month is that Denmark is obsessed with rules and a lot of these rules are obviously driven by the need to coerce people into funding the welfare state. There are rules for virtually everything, and strong fines for non-compliance. Pay any of your bills a day late and you'll get a reminder with large fees added, as we found to our cost when we first moved here and weren't so well organised.
As an example of rules interfering with the normal course of business, my partner has childcare qualifications and wanted to set up as a childminder and knew 2 women who wanted to place their children with her specifically, but child-minding is a state-controlled activity and the rules are that she would have had to place our own young child with ANOTHER childminder and that the system would allocate random children to her to look after - the parents and her could not choose that she took these children even though both parties wanted to do a deal!
It is also said that Denmark is a modern socialist democracy and If democracy means the right to vote for a variety of left-wing parties and one or two that gravitate towards left-of-middle then I agree that it is indeed a democracy. As to the socialist part, then if this means that up to half the population (my guess) can get away with doing nothing and live off money coerced from the other hard-working half, then it is indeed extremely socialist. This view of socialism can be explained better by a Dane here , since it highlights an old-fashioned part of of Danish life called the "Jantelov". Basically this means that you should always be kept down at the same level as the rest of the crowd, and anyone who tries hard to better themselves deserves to be brought down a peg or two.
Aha you say, but what about the wonderful healthcare system we read so much about? Our experience of that is that it isn't really so dissimilar to the free healthcare system available in the UK. Some Danes honestly seem surprised that things like healthcare, schools, unemployment benefits and state pensions are just as available in other European countries as in their own, as this page shows. I think they are conditioned from an early age to believe that they are getting something better than the rest of the world in return for a life of high taxes.
A film released last year parodied many of these questions Danes currently have about their socialist system. Entitled "What to do about the Others", it tells the story of a near future where all Danish citizens are subjected to a test of their contribution to society. If their lives are unworthy then they are interned in concentration camps and disposed of. Couple this with the formation of a new political party who is promising to cut top rate tax to 43% (hey, it's a start...) and you can see the outlook is definitely changing here, though it will be slow and gradual.
It is especially younger Danes who never voted for this system in the first place, yet bear the burden and get fewer of the benefits who are looking at the rest of the world and asking questions about why they should continue to pay for this. In many cases, they answer this question themselves by relocating to other countries, and even retiring abroad is a common thing for Danes to do to ensure more of their pension stays theirs. I expect greater freedom of mobility and access to the internet to disspell this truth still further in the years ahead and for a country of only 5 million people they do seem to turn up in a lot of places you travel to.
As you might have guessed by now, I am not a great fan of socialism, and as a fellow IT Contractor you're probably not either. This is the reason why I devoted so much space to it - if you're moving here you have to grit your teeth and be prepared for it!