You seem to be remarkably certain that Cthulhu always swims left
Certain no, but I think the trend is real.
So if you just hang the top 1% from the lamp posts and throw all their wealth into the sea, that would be a good thing? It would certainly reduce inequality and you seem to be fine with negative-sum approaches to the issue.
If you're attempting to reduce poverty in a way that's not increasing overall wealth, then it's zero- or negative-sum in wealth terms by definition (e.g. redistributive taxation would be zero-sum except for the overhead, so it's negative-sum). I'm saying that a) some negative-wealth-sum actions (such as redistributive taxation) are positive utility in some circumstances b) an intervention that destroys X amount of wealth (or even X% of wealth) and produces Y amount of utility will be worthwhile in countries that are richer than some threshold and not worthwhile in countries that are poorer than that threshold, because the marginal utility of wealth decreases as you get richer.
(and c) these are the main kind of policies where there is left-right disagreement; everyone supports policies that increase wealth and don't increase inequality or have other negative effects).
...are positive utility in some circumstances ... and produces Y amount of utility
Of course, all this depends on how do you understand and calculate utility. Your statements are true for certain values of "utility" and not true for other values.
...where there is left-right disagreement; everyone supports policies that increase wealth and don't increase inequality or have other negative effects
That's actually not true. You are assuming that wealth and inequality are all that people are interested in. Let me suggest to you another value: po...
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: