it's not even clear that socialism promotes less inequality
As a socialism survivor, I can confirm that equality is not only about money.
In socialism, an important Party member could have exactly the same salary as everyone else, and yet be a thousand times more rich than the average peasant, if we use a meaningful definition. They would get a lot of stuff and services for free, as a bribe; it wouldn't be even considered a bribe, because everyone would do it to maintain good relations with the powerful Party members. They would be allowed to use privately many things that technically are a common property, but it is a property inaccessible to the average peasant. They could get almost everything they want (as long as there is not a political reason against it) without using money. So the fact that they would have the same amount of money as everyone else would be completely irrelevant, even if it was true, which it probably wouldn't be anyway.
Money is just a civilized way to get stuff and services. If you have power, you simply take the stuff and services, without paying. In socialism, people even give it to you "willingly", because they are aware that if you are in a bad mood, you could ruin their lives and lives of their familes just by making a phone call.
Batman Begins (2005) Carmine Falcone: Now, I wouldn't have a second's hesitation of blowing your head off right here and right now in front of 'em. Now, that's power you can't buy! That's the power of fear.
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: