This also happens in corporate culture, because of nepotism and grift. It happens much faster after a corporation captures the government / institutions that would normally check it. I believe in meritocracy, but once you have institutional capture, meritocracy is just a con to convince smart people to work for a fraction of what they could earn on the type of unregulated market that allowed their overlords to become wildly rich. For example: I'm probably the best designer/coder of casino games ever to walk this planet. I can't make a living doing what I love and I'm great at, because it's either $150k a year from a shady company in Cyprus [edit: which is shit money from people I'd never work for], or it's wholesale illegal to do it on my own. Elon Musk never wrote a line of code, but a good chunk of his PayPal money came from facilitating gambling transactions, essentially illegal at the time and certainly more so now.

Merit will get you a 401(k) and a job where you have a nice coffee station and some bean bags to sit on, and a ping pong table. Lord knows, the ping pong table proves you've got merit. But does your boss really have more merit than you? It seems to me that the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the less actual merit people exhibit, and the less they notice it among their underlings (as opposed to loyalty or ass-kissing), but the more they claim to believe in it.

I'm not arguing against merit. I'm a capitalist. I'm just pointing out that the people who so often tout merit are the same people who get most of their tax credits from backroom deals with politicians, and don't seem to earn their keep by the sweat of their own brow. Merit would imply the ability to do both equally well.