I agree with you. If a privately owned company wants to pay over-market for certain jobs, that's their lookout.
As an old fart, and I've been in quite a different industry than the subject of the story, what has made a company successful is building a really desirable product in a growing market. People do a lot of handwaving about company cultures, quality of life, renumeration, but I think that building the right stuff will overwhelm practically any internal problems.
Due to ignorance and propaganda, uninformed people think that socialism is universal healthcare, higher pay, etc
They don't know the meaning of the word nor how this ideology works.
Socialism as it is technically understood is state ownership of the means of production and all parts of the economy. The state controls how the economy is traded and who gets what.
Scandinavian countries are social democracies which very strongly embrace capitalism, and have strong social safety nets through taxation.
I've never formally learned Political Science so I could be off-base here, but doesn't it go like this?
Socialism: the workers own the means of production
Communism: the state owns the means of production*
*Granted, what I was taught in history is that socialism is viewed as a halfway point where communism is the ultimate goal, and that communism should involve ownership by the workers rather than the state— pretty much always, however, the state ends up with ownership (otherwise it's hard to maintain order in a by-intrinsic-nature oppressive society).
If I'm wrong, please feel free to critique and offer some readings? :)
Start by looking up the words in one of the many free online dictionaries.
Both mean state control of the economy. One of them means paying people what the state thinks they need and requiring them to work how the state thinks they can, as opposed to other strategies like competitive market forces.
The Soviet Union, and all of these other states explicitly claimed not to be communist exactly as justification for the existence of a strong state, and to argue that the differences and oppression was "necessary" to lead their countries towards a hypothetical future communism. For a very good reason: One of Lenins big theorethical claims to fame is a work (State and the Revolution) where he argues strongly for Marx view that under communism the state is superfluous and will "whither away".
Whether or not one agrees that these countries were socialist (depends greatly on ones definition of socialism, but e.g. Marx argued that socialism was not a single ideology, but used it as a vague catch-all term and proceeded to criticise forms of socialism he saw as flawed or outright oppressive and reactionary; Engels later pointed out that they could never have written a "Socialist Manifesto" in 1848 because the term was used by too many people they strongly disagreed with, and was not radical enough), or whether or not they were trying to achieve communism, all of them at one time or other argued they were far away from achieving communism.
Point being that you have your terms reversed at very best. Communism implies the class struggle has ended, and a central idea of Marxism is that the state only exists as a political power for one class to oppress another, and that as a consequence ending the class struggle would make the state superfluous.
Under a purely Marxist view "the state" owning the means of production might represent a reasonable immediate outcome of a socialist revolution. With the caveat that in his works on the Paris Commune, Marx hailed the Commune as a demonstration of how a workers state could be the outcome of destroying the capitalist state, and criticised the Commune mostly for one thing: For not going far enough in destroying the older state to replace it with directly elected and recallable delegates.
But there are many other socialist ideologies as well, that do not ascribe to state ownership of the means of production - Marx wrote about some of them himself in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, it's not quite right to delineate them that way either. Marx never did.
In fact that separation of socialism and communism comes from the Bolsheviks seeking to justify their oppressive state with a "but we've only reached socialism so far" defense.
As a Scandinavian, I think that makes no sense. Germany introduced modern welfare reforms long before Scandinavia: Bismarck - a far right monarchist - introduced a pension system and healthcare insurance in the 1880's. His rivals on the right at the time mockingly accused him of being a "state socialist", and he embraced the term, because his intent was to out-flank the socialists of the time by offering limited concessions that went further than even some Marxists. At the same time as he offered the carrot, he applied the stick: dozens of socialist organizations and newspapers were outlawed, their leaders arrested.
Through European history, we've seen universal healthcare and pensions and general welfare reforms come about largely as a result of the combined efforts of two groups: growing labour movements, and Christian democrats. In Germany Bismarck leaned on the Catholic party Zentrum, forerunners of the modern ruling centre-right CDU, and argued heavily from a point of view of Christian morality to get his reforms through.
In Norway, the first welfare reform was introduced in 1894, after Bismarcks model. After World War II, there was broad agreement across the board for welfare reforms, but it was first a broad coalition of centrist and centre-right forces that introduced the first major expansion of welfare: The Borten government, led by the agrarian "Centre Party", in coalition with Left (classic liberals), the Christian Peoples Party (centre right Christian democrats) and Right (classical small-c conservatives, which in Norway makes them the traditional right wing, but relatively moderate). They certainly got the support of the left, and the Labour Party subsequently expanded the welfare system, but the foundation of welfare in Norway like in most of the rest of the developed world was not a unilateral expansion of socialism but reflective of a combination of growing labour movements and Christian morality.
Some notable exceptions: In the UK, the Christian voter groups are split between Labour the Conservatives, for example, with internal factions in both causing tension.
What is unique about the Scandinavian model is not healthcare or higher pay per se, but the compressed pay scale. It's a bit embarrassing to earn "too much" in Norway, for example. Salaries ranges are much flatter.
But that is not just due to Scandinavia changing, but due to the rest of the world changing. Look at pre-Reagan America for example, and executive pays were a far lower multiple of the company averages.
