Wait, are you saying that Hacker News is the government? What does having a post getting removed from Hacker News have to do with what the government tells us to say? I'm sorry but I don't follow this line of argument at all.
The article doesn't say the government is the reason children could not have decent chemistry sets in the 1970's and '80's. That's the straw-man argument. However, I can't prove that fear of the government, due to what could be seen as an anti-government article, is the reason Hacker News pulled the post from the feed. I really don't know.
Given the topics quite routinely discussed here, I very much doubt that. But the article in question is a really short piece, and, so far as I can see, it's strictly politics - what makes it HN front page material? (popularity by itself is not a valid metric here)