A great article about restoring meritocracy to the United States… a few excerpts:
To this day, Americans are unusually supportive of meritocracy, and their support goes a long way toward explaining their embrace of American-style capitalism…
In politics, for example—a field in which value is mostly redistributed rather than created—the benefits conferred by meritocracy are relatively small compared with the benefits conferred by cronyism. If I appoint my friends to office, even when they aren’t terribly competent, I lose relatively little efficiency and gain quite a lot of power. Hence meritocracy is difficult to sustain in government…
Two powerful forces are threatening to drive America from a meritocratic equilibrium to a nonmeritocratic one. Recall that to survive in a democratic country, a meritocracy must enjoy a welcoming culture and offer large, widespread benefits to citizens. In the United States, both of these factors are being challenged: the first by a spreading belief that markets are a bad method of rewarding the meritorious; the second by a reduction of the benefits that most people derive from those markets…
But it isn’t necessary to support big business to support free markets. Indeed, the two positions are often at odds, which is why so many Americans who love competition and freedom of choice nevertheless distrust the power that big business is gaining in our society. What we need is something that we might call a pro-market, not pro-business, agenda, one that defends the market system that has served America so well without supporting the businesses, whether they’re banks or car companies, that have grown, as the phrase has it, “too big to fail.”