What are characteristics of a state? What must be feelable, to know that one is in the home state? How the activity of the state is visible? One now will ask, what all that has to do with Satyre? Let’s focus to the state of Austria and try to look a bit behind the curtain…

Austria is a state located in the middle of Europe. The area is limited by a borderline called frontier. Within this frontiers several items are part of the state’s substance.

First of all the people. Four main categories are visible: the so called productive ones, they mainly work to contribute to the gross domestic product. The second group looks for intelligent projects, to reinvest a part of the national income called taxes to the benefit of the general public. The third group are children and teenager and the fourth the group of retired people.

Next the state is home for a lot of companies and enterprises. Some produce goods, others do the trading and a third group deals with the tourists environment. What’s the role of the state in relation to these units? Because these units make the gross domestic product by good management, the state has big interest to provide best conditions in order that all units may work under minimized frictions and with good opportunity to get market leaders.

But there are also necessary “enterprises” which don’t fit to the mentioned categories. E.g. the military, executive groups, etc. They are financed by the state.

As an Austrian inhabitant one feels the the states activity monthly when looking to the salary check. One can go to bed with the good feeling, that a lot of the income worked out will be used for intelligent public projects, contributing even to cover own needs today and in future. Starting with the gross salary amount about 25% immediately will be paid as tax directly by the employing company. The real net amount the Austrian inhabitant earns finally, is about 50 70% of the rest. But even of that money in minimum 20% of VAT is deducted, for fuel even a lot more. In average about 60% of the gross income goes to the state and about 40% is dedicated to own pleasure. This also means, that from 160 monthly working hours, about 100 are needed to satisfy the states hunger. But this money is spent well, you’ll see.

What’s now about states hunger? One must not imagine that as a hole, were feed immediately disappears after eating. The organization behind consist of teams of well selected civil servant specialists. The nomination of these specialists happens exclusively because of their high level qualification but nothing else. This high level allows to execute analysis and decision works on a very responsible basis. Of course the specialists don’t act event or even accident driven. In their recurring workshops, they execute goal, strategy and execution tasks in order to build up a clear and common understanding in short, medium and long term targeting and planning. Because of that preparation they can pass all decisions on a solid base. They also use instruments which gives feedback about the system performance. If problems arise, they immediately can set corrections.

Beside all that, the state owns ingenious concepts to select, which tasks are better done by civil servant organizations and which are better done by profit oriented groups. Also mixed models work really satisfying, e.g. educational concepts. The all-around education is government matter, but the specialized education is matter of a cooperation between government and industry. The industry side always tells what actually are required skills and cooperates in sponsoring and teaching the teachers etc. This closed feedback circle allows very flexible and powerful educational concepts.

The civil servant specialists regularly screen concepts of third states in order to select paradigms with good efficiency. They do good revise work in order to improve the concepts before introduction.

An important strength is the will, only to spend public money to potentially productive projects. The sponsored organizations shall be supported to do the necessary steps to achieve own competitiveness. There is strict money flow restriction to only cost producing projects with little value add.

The number of civil servant specialists is checked and corrected periodically in order always to have a well balanced relation between productive and non productive people for not to gain funding problems. Besides that, the systems looks for best and active direct income. Otherwise nobody would understand, why tax income should cover the well known and calculable additional costs. If necessary, civil servant specialists can move to industrial jobs without any obstacles or loss.

Austrian unionists are well trained specialists which perfectly know the needs of their employees but also the limits of the management. Together with the management they use their knowledge, creativity and rich scope of ideas in order to detect possible reasons for problems as early as possible. Using their skills, they are willing to find together very flexible models in order to strengthen productivity and competitiveness…

Happy Austria, island of blissfulness…

If you now come to the conclusion, that things you interpret as reality look different from above when watching TV, there are possible several cases. Either you watch the wrong program, always soap operas instead of reality and news programs, or you interpret the advertisement blocks as news, or … or you recognize that above article is Satyre only.

A state, what’s that? R1-20000701