[gdfsnob]

"Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News"

As if Hacker News is somehow more qualified on economic issues than Cato, which has 10 Nobel Laureates?

F. A. Hayek

Milton Friedman

James M. Buchanan

Robert Mundell

Edward C. Prescott

Douglass C. North

Vernon L. Smith

Gary S. Becker

Ronald Coase

Thomas C. Schelling

http://www.cato.org/people/nobel-index.html

[bendotc]

You seem to be arguing against a point I didn't make. I didn't say that "Hacker News is more qualified on economic issues than Cato" as you put it. I said that I found the case made in this blog post to be questionable and that this political content is not well-suited to Hacker News.

I was not impeaching the intellectual output of the Nobel laureates associated with the Cato institute, but I do have to note here that none of them wrote this blog post, nor is there any indication that any of them reviewed it. I could further debate your name-dropping, but I've wasted enough key-strokes on this as is.

[fleitz]

If politics is not suitable for HN then why do we have lots of articles about 'open source', patent reform, privacy issues regarding Facebook,Twitter, articles about wikileaks, lulzsec, the FBI, etc.

These are all primarily political and non-technical issues that affect our industry just as the Khan Academy affects our ability to learn in the politicized education industry.

[gdfsnob]

"the Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News, IMO"

Sorry, but you dismiss Cato because of its "free-market spin" and then call its main thesis "questionable", when 10 Nobel Laureates, who probably know far more than us on economic issues, are associated with Cato. I'd also note that Paul Krugman, Delong, and Sachs -- all very prominent Democratic supporters -- are very pro free market as indicated on the links you'll find on their Wikipedia pages.

[thisuser]

You would think that at least a few of these Laureates would entertain the possibility that under the right conditions a community of technocratic professionals freely debating the merits of various policies could have a better answer than any single individual picked by a committee of Norwegians. It's almost like this is a free market of ideas, and you being downvoted is an invisible hand telling you to have better ideas if you want to make it.

[Symmetry]

I wouldn't use the present tense when some of those guys are dead.

[gdfsnob]

Well, only 2 are dead, and those two (Hayek and Friedman) are probably the most famous libertarian economists/thinkers. I think it would be safe to assume they would support the article above.