Newmark's Door

This is nicely put by John Di Leo:

In nearly every other arena of life, we see people and organizations in a competitive environment rise to the challenge.  When a sports team gets better, its rivals do, too.  They have to.  When a restaurant or department store becomes more popular, its competitors across the street or across the mall quickly up their game as well, offering better value, better service, better quality, better ambiance — whatever it takes to win back the customers they’ve lost.

Only in politics do we see this apparent disinterest in results.  Only in the sphere of state and local governments do we see politicians uninterested in the decline of their cities, the indigence of their population, the loss of opportunities for the generations to come.