This was my exact thought. In fact before reading the article I actually thought that this was just an article about Ebola that an HN admin had retitled after being annoyed by the NYT paywall.
The NYT paywall is easy to get around. (Copy/paste the title and search for it in Google) Of course that's the irony mentioned, since the article in question was paywalled.
Just open it in incognito mode.
I know but still. I've had to do this enough that I think I am going to just write a chrome extension that will modify the referrer to be google.com on every request on specified sites.
That or actually pay them.
That's kind of beside the point. You should carefully consider the potential negative impacts of your own paywall (reduction in useful ideas that others could benefit from, such as ideas on liberty and government) before writing critical articles of others' paywalls.