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I want the most talented and skilled people performing their best at what they are most talented and skilled at. That's how you make progress. I fail to see how that harms anyone, and certainly not everyone.

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It harms people when there would be a different group of "most talented and skilled people" if they were given the opportunity.

If everyone had the same capacity for achieving greatness, why are there so few geniuses? Do you think everyone is capable of the same level of greatness?

Did you ever stop to consider that we have so few geniuses because it takes money and connections to reach your potential in life, and a significant portion of the population never gets to enjoy an unbridled pursuit of their potential because their immediate concerns are with simply surviving?

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had great ideas, but they were also rich before they made a dime of their own money, and they never would have gotten anywhere without that money and their connections.

I think it starts to fail once you attach different monetary or prestige rewards to different tasks, because people then try to game their way into positions without qualifications - and dismissing merit as a concept is just a more organized and scaled up way of this gaming.

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