What is the Leftist or liberal view of economic equality?  I was reading a blog post by a conservative philosopher today where I came across the following description of Leftists.

Fetishizers of equality, leftists would rather have everyone poor and equal rather than tolerate inequalities that benefit the worst off.

Do you consider yourself a Lefty?  Do you consider this an accurate or fair characterization of Leftism in America?  Do you believe in this kind of economic egalitarianism or do you have something else in mind? 

From what I can tell, Karl Marx didn't even hold this view.  And, surely, if anybody is a Leftist it's Karl Marx, right?  In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels write:

We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class.

They reiterate the point a little later in the same section.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.

That doesn't sound like total economic equality to me.  It sounds like they're against exploitation, but not like they are espousing a kind of economic egalitarianism according to which everybody receives and is limited to the same amount of money, goods, etc. as everybody else.  So, is it fair to characterize the Left as "fetishizers of equality" or is that simply a straw man of Leftism?