http://socialistworker.org/2015/06/24/class-capitalism-and-the-tech
I have some sympathy for the mods in that I don't see all the submissions that get flagged. It could be that without aggressive flagging, which will inevitably lead to some "errors" (this getting flagged that perhaps shouldn't have). It could be that HN would turn into nothing but flame wars about politics and complaints about the tech industry. People complain about what HN has turned into, but the quality of discussion here remains much higher (vastly higher, in many cases) than a lot of other forums. Craigslist, a while back, devolved from a good forum into something essentially unreadable.
Still, I have my doubts as to whether an article similar in treatment, depth, and tone, but from a libertarian point of view, would have been flagged. In this case, I do think it was a mistake to flag and remove this article, though I appreciate that any meaningful defense of a good discussion forum will inevitably involve a few mistakes like this.
edit Hm, seemed to preempt myself on that. I guess the post is fixed now.
For completeness, here's what I told the user who emailed:
Users flagged it. User flags make a post drop in rank and, when enough users do it, eventually kill the post. When there's an ongoing discussion, we typically unkill the post so that comments can continue. That's what I've done here.
The harder cases are posts like this one, where the community is divided on a political question, some want it on HN and others don't. In that case we usually stop short of overriding the rank penalty. The voting and flagging systems have been in a stable equilibrium for years, and we've learned that it's a mistake to fight that very much or very often.
But we do do it sometimes, I'd guess maybe 10% of the time (but haven't looked at the data). For example, sometimes an article is so substantive and otherwise so obviously a good fit for HN that it doesn't seem fair to the community to let the flags have their usual say. Sometimes a thread turns out to be unexpectedly high-quality and not a flamewar. And sometimes a story is of so much interest to the community that we couldn't stop it even if we wanted to (a recent example being the Strange Loop/Yarvin thing), in which case we turn flagging off for hopefully the best submission on the topic and treat the others as dupes.
In the end, there's no escaping editorial judgment, though not every HN user shares your positive view of it. We try not to over-exercise it, but never doing so would be suboptimal for the community. There's a tragedy of the commons paradox in there somewhere.