Several years ago, I read Tom Friedman's "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", which despite having been initially published in 1992, is still relevant today.

In it, Friedman discusses the process of globalization as a straightjacket--a form of societal discipline whose end result is generally speaking, peace and prosperity. More specifically, it refers to various economic and legal practices that create a stable investment environment--private property rights, standardized banking practices, sound fiscal policy, the rule of law and most importantly--transparency.

Countries like South Korea who enthusiastically abided by the discipline have gone from third world countries to major industrial powers. Those that did not are mired in soul-crushing poverty.

As South Korea's former PM, Lee Hong Koo stated:

In the old days we used to say, "History dictated this or that." Now we say that "market forces" dictate this and you have to live within those forces. It took us time to understand what had happened. We didn't realize that the victory of the Cold War was a victory for market forces above politics. The big decisions today are whether you have a democracy or not and whether you have an open economy or not. Those are the big choices. But once you've made those big choices, politics becomes just political engineering to implement decisions in the narrow space allowed you within this system."

It occurred to me the other day, while reading yet another article on how Americans are losing faith in their government that we are backsliding on the big choices.

Even media outlets like CNN, traditionally sympathetic to the Democrats third world political philosophy, are aghast at its reality. CNN asked all members of Congress to reveal their earmark requests (remember, transparency is an essential part of the social straight jacket...).

CNN correspondent Drew Griffin and a team of two staffers and six interns all 435 members of the House of Representatives a simple question - if they get obtain a copy of each representative's earmark request. Even with the Democrats' campaign promise before the last election that they wanted a more "open" government, 330 members of the House never responded to the simple request. Another 67 refused the interns' request. Ultimately, they were only able to obtain the earmark requests from the offices of 31 representatives. Out of the 31, seven said they had no earmark requests in the fiscal year 2008 budget.

Increasingly, the political class is engaged in influence-peddling, preventing existing laws on illegal immigration from being enforced, unilaterally abrogating trade agreements (ask a Canadian about softwood lumber--again, an earful...).

The government is broken. The 2008 elections, should by all rights be about fixing it, and that really is a process that starts with you and I.