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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank.

From TFA.

The Manhattan Institute (MI) is a right-wing 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director.[1] It is an associate member of the State Policy Network....

The Manhattan Institute has received funding from the Koch brothers. The Claude R. Lambe Foundation, one of the Koch Family Foundations, reported giving $2,075,000 to the Manhattan Institute between 2001 and 2012, the last year for which data is available. The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave $100,000 to the Institute in 2012.

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manhattan_Instit...

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That site is downweighted on HN, but not banned, along with other ideologically motivated journals that sometimes produces interesting (in HN's sense of the word) articles.

Generally we try to go by article quality, not site quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The current article probably doesn't clear the bar for a topic that has been repeated so often, but I didn't look very closely.

I was elevating visibility of probable bias. I was surprised at the effectiveness here.

I'm aware of HN's policy regarding material rather than sources. I disagree: quality assessment costs are significant, HN struggles with this as it is, time and attention finite, and reputation a useful and generally, if not universally reliable mechanism and heuristic for effecting low-cost dismissal of noise.

MI are part of a global network of strongly-motivated, well-financed, ideologically-driven, truth-averse rganisations, "of 461 partners in 97 countries around the globe".

https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory

They've been highly effective in shifting the Overton Window since 1947, to the benefit of their backers, largely monopolists (a topic on which they've most spectacularly influenced discussion, policy, law, and judicial decisions).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Director#Academic_life

The article's principle gripe seems to be that the window is shifting back. Just desserts, served late.

Knowing who wrote something is a useful data point to determine whether the author has an agenda, but it doesn't invalidate their point, if that is what you are getting at. Perhaps my own personal bias is showing, as I loathe the Koch brothers. But I find the article to be reasonable.

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