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Goal 4: Achieve Social & Economic Justice
- Encourage individual economic opportunity
- Oppose discrimination against individuals and groups
- Create equal access to infrastructure and social services
- Create a level playing field in the local economy
Social and Economic Justice embraces the ideal that we are all entitled to basic human rights. Justice is the first virtue of society – especially when focused on the most vulnerable among us. When some are diminished – all are diminished. It requires a balance of rights and responsibilities. In Washington County we work towards social justice by ensuring that all people have access to:
- Opportunity without discrimination;
- Basic social services which provide a social safety net;
- Public policies to sustain family wage jobs; and
- Sustainable economics for small, medium and large business.
Social and economic justice requires that we learn to work collaboratively with each other to create a truly civil society. This necessitates a vibrant system of public/private partnerships to meet the challenges before us – such as discrimination, poverty, health care disparities, homelessness, and environmental pollution.
Social and economic justice requires that the marketplace and government create a level playing field in which all who want to participate can do so without barriers imposed on them by a system which too often plays favorites by creating insiders and outsiders.
Social and economic justice requires negative and positive freedom, freedom from injustice and freedom to pursue happiness. Both aim at the public good, not just the good of the one. This habit of mind is social – its object is the good of others – to do unto others as one would have done to us.
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