Building the case for raising the minimum wage is an interesting one to be viewed objectively (not that it ever is), but I think it's also too early to tell with Seattle what the long-term outcomes are.
You're a bit mistaken about there being no system to give second chances right now. If an article hasn't had significant attention within about the last year, we don't treat reposts as dupes. That already helps quite a lot. However, the ideas that we're hoping to implement around this are different and, if they work, will have a more dramatic effect. So I hope you'll be willing to wait and see.
Now for the bad news. I'm afraid we don't agree that this "pitchforks" piece is a decent article. To me (qua moderator) it looks like a low-substance political riler-upper by an author who has been circulating the same message (including through HN) for a while now and happened to score a post on Politico, a questionable site for HN to begin with.
Qua reader, by the way, I have a different reaction. I kind of like that stuff and I find the root question very interesting. I mean the question of whether the postwar social order which has been so stable is threatened by current macroeconomic developments. But (qua moderator again) I think any HN discussions on that need to be seeded with higher-quality material.
So the reason you were frustrated in this case is not HN's dupe detector, it's that a moderator is more or less calling an article you like off-topic for HN. My thought was that since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7953608 did have some discussion, we could just treat all the reposts as dupes. Maybe that was overly finessey.
