Intergenerational wealth and meritocracy are not incompatible. People can spend thier money how they want, if they want to give it to thier kids they still earned it.
1. Good education hard to come by in the US, and immense wealth allows some people almost automatic access to the best education while others are outbid (either via property/school districts or via private school "donations" for entrance or via access to best prep services or via influence which is used to navigate "leadership" based entrance applications for k-12 schooling )
2. See item 1 -- this should not happen in the US, but it does. Our population has grown, but we've underinvested in schooling and all the foundational systems. The number of great schools has not necessarily grown with population. I see it myself in my hometown as skyscrapers rise, but schools are not built in proportion.
Allowing intergenerational wealth to bypass Problem 2 allows the plutocracy to avoid the problem with money (Problem 2) since it isnt their own problem anymore.
I agree with the other comments that meritocracy and inheritance are not at odds, especially if the meritocracy component is referring to positions of power & responsibility.
But your point is valid wrt America as it is. Education is a lynchpin of meritocracy. So, America's solution may need to include some reshaping of inheritance as a means to reshape the mechanisms of meritocracy. But the facile leftist take of (more or less) "ban inheritance" would be an overstep and create far more problems than its simplicity solves.
OP's point was that you can't, you either support the meritocracy or you support inheritance providing some people an unjust advantage.
The general understanding of a meritocracy is that merit is rewarded. "Having wealthy parents" isn't usually considered a merit...
In no scheme can you regulate away all forms of unearned advantage. The skills, capacities and potential we are born with vary.
People are tremendously motivated by providing for their children. Taking that motivation off the table will drive people to places where they can achieve it.
The long-term, highest-net-value producing system of distributing power / responsibility will be a meritocracy.
Second, money doesn't "dwindle" on its own. Unless you are actively gambling it away (literally or metaphorically), a large amount of money by itself produces more money of value at a certain baseline rate (by the ability to make broader and individually-riskier investments while managing aggregate risk - tl;dr, "why banks are profitable"), entirely independent of the merit of the person with the money. And even if you were to bury it in the ground like the dude in the parable of the talents, it would only lose out on inflation. It wouldn't rot or evaporate.
Finally, a couple of generations is a long time! Nations rise and fall in less time than that. My grandparents grew up under the British Raj. The whole of the Soviet Union lasted a couple of generations. If your "meritocracy" recognizes merit with latency on the order of a couple of generations, I'm not sure it's an effective meritocracy. If the US Senate had free and fair elections once every generation, replacing one-third of the participants each generation and allowing senators to hand-pick their successors whenever they wanted to retire, would you call that government a democracy?
1. Disagree. Yes, money can be used to buy power. But it's not power in itself. A strong meritocracy would focus on giving positions of responsibility (auditing/regulating/decision-making type powers) to people who show the merit to perform them well. Money is an advantage, but it is not the power to shape social systems.
2. Rich heirs who put all their wealth into safe investments and sit on it also aren't really getting much out of it. And that money isn't sitting away in a vault, it's a part of the economy. Rich heirs who buy yachts and mansions and hang with celebrities, but lack the merit to contribute anything useful, will burn through (most of) the wealth. It's not just common... it's the default outcome within a few generations.
3. Yes, generations are a long time. But that latency would apply to personal/family wealth rather than decision-making authority.
I'm not a pro-inheritance maximalist. I agree with various forms of taxation on inheritance. But there is value is allowing people to be motivated by their family's future. Inheritance is not inherently at odds with meritocratic assignment of political power.
Try convincing someone who has to work multiple jobs to support themselves and their family of that.
"A strong meritocracy would focus on giving positions of responsibility (auditing/regulating/decision-making type powers) to people who show the merit to perform them well. Money is an advantage, but it is not the power to shape social systems."
A "strong meritocracy" has about as much chance of existing as a non-corrupt totalitarian or communist system.
2. When you put your money in safe investments and sit on it, you get the interest out of it, which is hardly "not really getting much out of it!" Let's say you can get a 2% annual return by just not being actively bad with your money. If you have, say, a million dollars, then you can get $20K/year, forever, doing nothing - which is higher than the US minimum wage. It's not a lot of money to a rich person, but it's the difference between working and not working. And a net worth of a million dollars is hardly yachts-and-mansions levels of rich - it appears to be roughly the 90th percentile for net worth in the US, i.e,. one in ten people have access to this level of wealth. (Yes, I'm looking at real data from a real country, because if your system only works in theory, it doesn't work.)
And, of course, it's the difference between being motivated to work and not being motivated to work. You are correct that there's value in allowing people to be motivated to work - inheritance destroys that!
2. It's not about the unfair value that heirs get. It's about whether that would significantly distort the function of meritocracy. Yes, it's unfair that someone might get a 20k annual dividend, just like it's unfair that some people are born stunningly gorgeous or incredibly genius. As long as wealth tends to dwindle, these marginal inequities would not disrupt a functioning meritocracy.
On the final bit, the question becomes whether the motivation to provide for one's kids is greater than the demotivation of inheritance. I think the former is greater. Especially in people who might have a shot in creating a fortune.
Which raises another point -- one focused on real data rather than theory. Do you think it'd be a good move for a country to significantly clamp down on inheritance on its own? What impact would that have on the country's ability to attract and retain top talent?