An incorporated community is a community, structured as a corporation. Most bigger cities in the Western world are incorporated at some point, for better or worse. This article serves to compare the quality of life in an incorporated community versus an unincorporated community.
Before we address the differences between incorporated communities & unincorporated communities, we should discuss the natural state of a community and how it is that a community becomes incorporated.
The definition of community according to Oxford, is ‘a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common’. Every community begins unincorporated, no matter how organized they are. Some communities though, usually larger ones, become incorporated at some point. Since people rarely vote for incorporation unless they have personal interests, when a community is incorporated, the process is usually called ‘annexation’.
While people could vote to incorporate their communities, they rarely do. Hence the controversy around annexation. The reason why people don’t want annexed land & incorporated communities is because they know that the whole proposal is just a sneaky way to collect more taxes from hard-working people.
For example, I’m writing this article from an unincorporated community called Mendocino, California. While the businesses in Mendocino pay a county tax to Mendocino county, there is no city-tax. Therefore there is no city money to be wasted on city-workers who provide very minimal value to their communities (ex. police departments, parking enforcement, all workers who generate revenue for the city). The result of this conservative approach to community is very positive & easy to see; the town of Mendocino is peaceful & beautiful at all times.
However, in Fort Bragg, which is a town 10 miles north of Mendocino; things are much different. There are police & parking enforcement constantly patrolling the town, looking for somebody to mess with. Their main objective behind pulling people over & writing parking tickets is not to increase public order or safety. The objective is to raise money; it’s an incorporated community. Factually, police usually don’t even show up on-time in the event of an attack or robbery. 95% of the time, the assailant is gone & I have my sources at the bottom of this article if you disagree.
The rest of the tax dollars go to parking enforcement, and the outrageously expensive city projects that never seem to turn out well. None of these projects, from militarized police to grid-power, has been friendly to the environment or future generations. An incorporated community is like a miniature federal government; too big to stop.
The proper way to ensure order in a community is to empower all the good-natured people in the community rather than only police officers. Then balance will be brought go the community, and the response time for disasters will be divided into a fraction.
So instead of donating your hard earned tax-dollars to hungry hippos, use your influence to your advantage. Buy property near unincorporated communities, do your shopping there, support them in every way you can. Visit Mendocino.
Sources, more info about how police are not worth the tax-dollars we pay them: https://mises.org/
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