I spent an entire day getting the flags right, mostly because I didn't know about some of them. This is here as a reference to others just starting out and wanting to play with the MySQL Connector/C++ wrapper with the client included and statically linked.
This was done on Debian 7 64-bit and 32-bit.
I ended up installing the dev packages from the repo and statically linking them.
Debian has aptitude, and your installation only needed to be: $ sudo aptitude install libmysqlcppconn-dev
It probably would have installed boost-dev as well.
POSIX operating systems typically have an executable named pkg-config, you may have gotten away with linking your program with: $ g++ -static main.cpp `pkg-config --libs mysqlcppconn`
And note that those are backticks, not single quotes.
It is actually somewhat likely that pkg-config will not find mysqlccppconn because packages often name the pkg-config command different than the library name.
Chances are however, that the following command would make a list of possible names, and I imagine you are capable at finding the package you just installed in that list: $ pkg-config --list-all | grep sql
For me, pkg-config has suspiciously few packages in its list; the only *sql* is sqlite3.
In fact, searching my filesystem for *.pc turns up not a whole lot.