Ultimately, scarce resources, which take their own industries to produce, need to be allocated so the many goods and services we need and want can be designed, built, and/or executed/delivered. If you do not rely on merit to decide who does what, everything will absolutely collapse.
By “meritocracy” I mean the idea that it is morally just for people to be rewarded in money or social status proportional to their economic usefulness — an idea most people implicitly hold to some degree and which some libertarians trumpet as a core tenet. I think the implied inverse to this belief — in the extreme, that lack of economic usefulness deserves poverty — is morally repugnant and dangerous.