And in the additional comments, I ran across this:
https://www.fastcompany.com/40510522/meritocracy-doesnt-exist-and-believing-it-does-is-bad-for-you
Written by people who seem to confuse the concepts of merit, luck, and some other stuff.
Merit is, (Merriam-Webster), "the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward. "
Meritocracy is "government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability. "
Yet there is no guarantee that people with ability will always end up in the position that is most suited to their abilities. Meritocracy makes no such promise, yet the authors of this article seem to take that as evidence that meritocracy is a fallacy.
So, soapbox for a sec and then my point.
I've always had a problem with the results on the Ayn Randian philosophy, which I interpret more or less as: "Economic value is created by entrepreneurs, creating the value of goods while everyone else gets in the way." This egotistical, insufficient vision of the world has evolved into something insidious. Entrepreneurs generally do not succeed completely on their own, driven purely by their own ego, talent, effort, and sheer willpower. Usually they are the beneficiaries of capitalists, bankers and financiers who fund them, of a labor force that produces their product, of the rule of law to patent their product and to prevent thefts, of public infrastructure in the form of electricty, water, sewer, and roads that enable their business, of distributors and retailers to create an outlet for the product, for consumers who have discretionary income that allows them to choose to buy the product, etc. Yet when you talk to those who align philosophically with Rand, these factors are often conspicuously missing in their understanding of the importance of the world.
Many of these same people seem to take the viewpoint that "hey, I've been successful, therefore anyone else who tries can be successful too." In this point, I strenuously agree with the luck arguments made in the article I linked to above. It doesn't work that way. There are many factors that can combine into being successful. Luck, wealth, merit, none guarantee success. Their lack, however, certainly makes success at life much harder to achieve.
I lean libertarian, but I'm pragmatic (not "Pragmatic Libertarian"). I mean that I like many libertarian ideals, and when opportunity presents, I may prefer to see if a libertarian solution is workable. I don't get all bent out of shape about it, though, as long as there's some other reasonable solution. To be a functioning society, we need to come to some arrangement on how things should work. I usually find that no extreme is actually a good idea.
We held Thanksgiving here last year, and I was busy in the kitchen. I was listening to someone, a Republican, at the table rail against his slightly higher property taxes and how the government did nothing to deserve them. I interjected in a loudish voice that his property tax went to pay for his daughter's school, maintaining the streets, police, etc., and opined that I was perfectly fine paying property taxes here in our locality if that was the method we chose to fund education, road repairs, and keeping the streets plowed in winter.
I heard later via family elders that the not-loud-enough-for-me-to-hear response was that "He (meaning me) should go take his meds".
It struck me as the comeback of an empty-headed noise-hole.
I think that it is fundamentally irrational to argue against the current mechanisms we use to make our society functional without having some alternative to replace them with.
I generally want the best people we can find to be doing the things that we need to have done. That's meritocracy. I'm waiting to hear a rational alternative that doesn't have idiots running the show.