The most perfect meritocratic element of our society is professional sports. In that world a few superstars are showered with enormous wealth, a larger group make a decent living, and the remaining athletes of the world have to find some other way to survive. Without some form of redistribution - noblesse oblige or taxation or you name it - you'll get that kind of distribution over much of society.
But Liberal Larry...
I will decide what is "noblesse oblige". After all, I am morally superior to you.
So you want to redistribute the wealth of athletes to other athletes? I would love to see that happen, just to poke a finger in your chest when the entire sports economy collapses.
Because of these non-sensenical, short sighted, self-absorbed, elitist conceptions of how an economy should ne run, we have $2 trillion dollars in federal spending where a good 2/3's of it goes from one group from another. This is not enough for you! And here is the real news; this will never be enough.
The liberals and their leftists leaders have a truly lopsided sense of guilt. They want to correct the so-called ills of our economy by redistribution because of this mis-placed guilt. But, when these programs are clearly demonstrated as being failures, there is no guilt to be found by the liberals. No shame is about them then.