He also advocated light taxes, free trade, conservation of natural resources, welfare measures for the old and disadvantaged, and more nearly equal sharing of wealth.
The idea is that citizens might be unequal in wealth, resources, welfare, and other dimensions of their condition, yet be equal in status in a way that enables all to relate as equals.
Responsibility to refer would rest predominantly with health professionals, but provided adequately resourced welfare rights services are available, this could become routine practice.
Mr Eklund sums it up: "The tax base is being eroded by international competition".Freedom of choiceGiven scarce resources, the welfare state must either shrink, for example by supplementing public with private pensions, or become more efficient.
Since achieving power, Mr Correa, an economist educated in the US, has followed an agenda broadly similar to other leftist leaders in the region, increasing state control of the oil industry and other natural resources, increasing welfare, and altering the constitution to make it easier for him to remain in office.
He thus views both aspects, resources and welfare, as necessary and irreducible.
This view of culture is similar to the conventional view of disability in distributive justice – an unchosen circumstance that makes it harder to convert resources into welfare.
Imagine for example that some people, the severely disabled, are far worse off than others, and are through no fault or choice of their own extremely poor transformers of resources into welfare.
For this reason, they argue against justifying redistributive measures to achieve inclusion on the grounds that they correct natural inequalities in skills, talents, or the ability to convert resources into welfare.
A second, related, way in which distributive justice theorists have approached social and cultural identity is as a commitment that gives rise to inefficiencies in the conversion of resources into welfare.
(There is a complication here, because the resource-oriented approach also opposes the capability approach, which so to speak stands midway between resources and welfare. This raises the question whether the capability approach is an unstable compromise (see Dworkin 2000, chapter 7).
