It's been a while since I've blogged about Victor Davis Hanson (aka VDH) but, via Instapundit, I found this article about my man and his academic / professional history.    His curious roots:

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON leads a double life. A fifth-generation raisin farmer in California's fertile Central Valley, Hanson is also a historian of ancient Greece, a lyrical defender of American agrarianism, and a prolific contributor to conservative opinion magazines. His columns so caught the fancy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that he has enjoyed audiences with both. It's hard to say which is stranger: that a raisin farmer should exert such influence, or that a classics scholar should.

And the power of ideas:

...These are confusing times, and Hanson wields a few simple ideas with blunt force. Western culture, in his view, emanates from ancient Greece and prizes consensual government, private markets, self-criticism, and rational inquiry. Where such values are found, political, economic, and military preeminence follow. The non-Western world lags behind the West because it does not share in the Greek cultural legacy, having opted instead for despotism, theocracy, illiberal markets, and the plain old laziness that has men whiling away afternoons playing backgammon in the cafes of the Middle East.

...On the domestic front, Hanson's views reflect the deep-seated social conservatism of the farm world. But they also reflect its populism. Despite Hanson's enthusiasm for the Bush administration's foreign policy-''Being unpredictable and scary is valuable in war. That's why Bush is a good leader.''-he remains a registered Democrat who was raised reciting William Jennings Bryan's ''cross of gold'' speech and who has antagonized big agribusiness in a region practically owned by it. ''I'm not comfortable with these people of the golf club set,'' he says of the Republicans.

...Hanson does not seem much given to regret, but as the afternoon wears on he confesses that there's one thing he wonders about as his three kids hit college age. Did his scorched-earth battle against the academy devalue education in their eyes? He knows he was raised to value learning. And now he suspects that he unwittingly raised his kids to look on it with scorn.

''To be honest with you,'' Hanson had said earnestly in his garden just that morning, ''the university is a really rotten institution.''

I often say that much of my politics / philosophy is shaped by my experience in the software industry.   It breeds an underlying distrust of "academic" politicians / economists / legal theorists and a recognition of just how often *all* the experts get it wrong.  I've been privileged, for example, to work on early efforts by the industry to bring broadband via Interactive Television to the market along with a host of smaller intellectual fads.  

On every possible level, we were all so sure that interactive TV would bring Information At Your Fingertips and at every possible level we thought it was just a matter of getting enough smart engineers, technicians, and marketing folk together to make it all work.   And we were all wrong.

In a market setting, when the experts get it wrong, there are significant limits to how far "they" can lead "us" astray and strong safeguards built into the market to prevent too much cost.   Firms simply go under.   Or, if there are still hopeful assets underlying the firm, a hostile take over could be launched.   Or, if the managers are have sufficient humility, they recognize that their strategy was flawed and reevaluate their options.

It's well understood, for example, that only 1 in 10 new product/service introductions in the private sector actually stick / work.   The market is great at doing the dirty work necessary to clean up the wasted resources created by the other 9 efforts and recycle them into the next batch of 10 experiments.

The same forces - and they are the EXACT same forces - unleashed within the government have practically no bound and the errors accumulate ad nauseum.   There is precious little recognition that 9 out of 10 government projects - advocated by experts - similarly "fail" and even less recognition that the "recycling" process are almost absent altogether.

The reason Hanson resonates so much with me is because he recognizes the same forces -- that "experts" are wrong and often self-deceived (Greek Hubris);   that the individual solving his own problems is MOST likely to generate quality decisions;  that while we should always be open minded and receptive to cultural criticism, that these are themselves cultural traits that should be elevated;  and so on.

Keep writing dude!

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