Update 2: Locker Room’s Daren Bakst reports that the annexation committee will recommend a bill proposing a moratorium to the full House.
Annexation growth numbers are here. The numbers are sigificant in larger cities, though they don’t distinguish between voluntary and forced annexations. My guess is the majority are “city initiated.”
Late last week I spoke with Rep. Paul Luebke about the possible House bill that would put a moratorium on annexation until June 2009. The House committee meets later this afternoon, and everyone I spoke with anticipates there will be a bill.
Luebke is also a UNCG sociology professor, and I took two of his classes in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I reminded him that he was a major influence in my conversion to conservatism, only because he did such a good job of presenting the information and letting us decide for ourselves what we did with it. One such piece of information was Thomas Edsall’s The New Politics of Inequality, which argued at the time that the Democratic party was being hijacked younger guys, many of them wealthy, who are more concerned with image than creating effective policy. If that’s the case, I reasoned, then I’ll support the rich guys who aren’t ashamed of their wealth, or anybody else’s, for that matter.
I told Luebke this, and he appreciated the compliment.
Update: David Mamet’s conversion:
I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
