Daren,

It is also important to note that the claim in the N&O is false.

    But it serves the interests of a community at large — a community to which people whose property is being annexed belong, likely to their benefit.

The community at large is served by a fragmented and overlapping urban area not a consolidated government that the forced annexation supporters want.   People receive the services that they select by locating in a certain area.  For example, people who live in Cary receive a higher level of services at higher cost than those who live outside Cary in the county. And the competition between units of local government creates different levels of services and tax rates that correspond to citizen preferences.

Charles Tiebout first discussed this in his famous 1956 article “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.”

    Tiebout’s key insight was that this problem is different when local governments provide goods to citizens who can move among distinct communities. If citizens are faced with an array of communities that offer different types or levels of public goods and services, then each citizen will choose the community that best satisfies his or her own particular demands. Individuals effectively reveal their preferences by “voting with their feet.” Citizens with high demands for public goods will concentrate themselves in communities with high levels of public services and high taxes, while those with low demands will choose other communities with low levels of public services and low taxes. Competition among jurisdictions results in homogeneous communities, with residents that all value public services similarly. In equilibrium, no individual can be made better off by moving, and the market is efficient. It does not require a political solution to provide the optimal level of public goods.

Empirical studies to confirm his theory have been conducted by the Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues at Indiana University’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.  They show that costs go up and citizen satisfaction goes down as local governments get larger and less competitive.  Supporters of forced annexation in NC do not want to admit that they are supporters of a technique that produces larger and larger monopoly governments that are controlled by bureaucrats not citizens.