But meritocracy needs a certain amount of social protection/insurance to be 'fair'. Imo.
Does having more or certain merits make you a better person? Entitled to more compensation? Do certain connections you are born into and people you are born from?
Because even in méritocratie societies by heart, how do you cut those things out?
And at the extreme but unfortunately far to frequent level: what if you are born with a severe handicap, a very low iq, a crippling disease?
That's why I am socialist by principle.
Yes, meritocracy does lean capitalist, if not aristocratic. Different societies have different arbitrary standards of merit. Usually we point out how athlete salaries are too high and teacher salaries are too low.
In any primitive society, if you are sufficiently dysfunctional, you are left behind to the wolves (hunter/gatherer society). But we know from archeology that slightly more advanced settled society provided for the dysfunctional (but not criminal) thru family/clan support. It was a matriarchy or patriarchy, that noblees oblige goes with the territory. That is distinct from children. Now that we have transcended family and clan, the kingdom or state takes on the partial responsibility for dealing with the indigent. This is on top of, that as a species, we take a crap load of time to reach adulthood, so that 1/3 of our population is non-productive. As said over here now, women and children are the engine of socialism, in that as the husband and father is destroyed by state policy, more and more of what a husband/father does, is taken over by government assistance.
I would ask, why destroy the nuclear family? Why not support and promote it? Demogoguery.