Tell you what, here’s a link to the Forbes List of billionaires. Why don’t you go through that and list out all the ones who you’d call “lefties”.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/11/worlds-richest-people-billionaires-2009-billionaires_land.html

#5 is definitely right that there’s a huge cultural component to working with rich folks, which further limits the supply of political entrepreneurs. The observation also contains the germ of a counterargument: being rich severely skews the people you hang out with and how they act, which can push you to be more conservative. Still, I’m skeptical this is the whole story.

Considering that perhaps *the* defining characteristic of the right is the belief that rich people deserve their riches, should have more of them, and should be more revered by everyone by the personal awesomeness that made them rich, I’m not particularly surprised to find a strong political skew within this demographic.

There *are* some lefty billionaires – Gates and Soros come to mind – but I’m not sure if either of them is crazy, and more to the point, there are a lot more Scaifes and Coorses. (Gates, AFAIK, prefers to run his own organization rather than have someone run it for hire. Perhaps that is related to the fact that he is the maker of a fortune (in at least some sense), not the heir to one.)

Overall, you make an excellent case for stronger inheritance taxes – and isn’t it interesting how very vehement a movement funded by the *heirs* of rich people is about the “death tax”? Andrew Mellon didn’t pay the estate tax (AFAIK), but Richard Mellon Scaife sure did. Perhaps that’s why the latter is the one who intensely hates it.

I’m sure the second part surprised some people; after all doesn’t big business want to avoid regulation? The answer is no: Big businesses can control the regulation to their benefit in a way that harms them least, while keeping small business from being competitive with them because the regulations introduce costs which may only be covered by scale. Big business has money, money buys access, access leads to laws and regulation favoring the money. Endless circles, independent of which party is in power for closing the loop.

better would be: “liberal communists nevertheless remain among the agents of the structural violence (albeit in a tiny minority)”

*i know what zizek means but surely the entire point of the term “structural violence” in his argument is to indicate that the agency of individuals, even nominally powerful individuals of good heart, is ultimately neither here nor there

…We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to. [...]
They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.

If a thesis strikes you as intellectually dodgy but poliitcally convenient, that’s usually a cue to disregard the thesis.

Occam’s Razor, here: isn’t “where are all the left-wing billionaires?” kind of a self-answering question?

Just like the average baseball fan doesn’t care about batting or pitching, just fielding.

And like the average bookstore hardly carries novels and doesn’t even have a fiction section.

The average moviegoer has no interest in films made after 1950 or so.

The average economist takes it for granted that central planning is more efficient and dynamic than markets.

Yup.

Technological, economic, and cultural change- changes that come about as a result of aggregated small changes and small actions on the parts of many different people- can be ‘not from the top’. But they aren’t primarily chosen or led, either, so these sorts of changes are rarely very useful in deliberately attaining specific outcomes. You can sort of try to engineer them, sometimes (see, e.g., Stallman’s attempts to bring software ‘to the masses’ in a particular way, or perhaps Ford’s early attempts at fair compensation to induce worker loyalty to capitalism) but that is hard to attempt and even harder to succeed at.

Political change in a large, modern polity- which is what Aaron is talking about, and I think what you’re really talking about as well- is a different beast. Because it involves organizing large groups of people to take explicit, conscious actions, it always has leaders, elites, and supporting institutions. They may or may not be well organized (in this particular case it seems like ‘less’ though I haven’t read the book yet). They may be more or less responsive to the interests of their particular masses, and their particular masses may be larger or smaller. They may or may not style themselves as populists; may or may not actually be populists. But these leaders and institutions are always there, consciously seeking specific change. So it is really hard to see what social change is that isn’t, in some way, ‘from the top’, at least as you seem to be defining it here.