It's difficult for me to believe this observation is being trashed so hard.

No, meritocracy likely is not the best system. It just happens to be better than the others we've tried at scale so far-- including attempting to give everyone the same opportunities regardless of ability. What else is being described there, if not communism? What am I missing?

The real underlying problem is that we are strongly predisposed to naturally arrange into hierarchies. That's not something you're going to take out of people. When you try, they spontaneously form their own. In a system where you say you're giving everyone equal opportunity, people will still pursue acquiring power over others, and will try to hold on to it when they get it. We aren't likely to stop this behavior, and if we do, at that point I'd argue we would essentially be a different species.

+1. The grandparent's statement is a paraphrase of "from each according to ability, to each according to need", which is a classic communist slogan.

This is a logical leap i'm afraid. We have been trying to give people what they need using government welfare for a century now. It's not communism to correctly understand that some people need to be given opportunities to prove themselves in the market regardless of their race, wealth, etc.

I understand what you’re saying, and technically you’re correct. However, the quote I referenced is typical of the coded language being used to justify and advocate for much more extreme policies of redistribution that I’m not convinced many would agree with.

What you call "redistribution" is what others would call "returning stolen wealth to those who created it". The people who use what you refer to as "coded language" believe that as laborers, they create wealth which is stolen by those who don't labor but instead merely own assets. They believe that wealth and value are created through labor, not by ownership, and therefore labor deserve a larger portion of the wealth than they are getting right now. Therefore it's not "redistribution" of wealth at all, as those who currently hold this wealth had no right to it in the first place.

That’s a ridiculous equivalency. You can provide high quality education to all without USSR style communism. In fact I’d argue the long term success of a capitalist system relies on it.

I’m not so sure about “high-quality” being possible for all. “Reasonable quality” I’d agree with, but truly high-quality education is incredibly labor and resource intensive to provide as it must be tailored to the student to a significant degree.

In my experience, providing “a high quality education for all” just isn’t possible, because it’s dependent upon what caliber of students are in the classroom. Stipulating an equal distribution of ability levels doesn’t raise all boats, it drags the most capable students down. What I don’t understand is why it’s often considered acceptable to disregard the needs of strong students. Don’t they also have a right to be challenged in the classroom?

In my experience education has been defunded for decades while wealth inequality has been exacerbated. One only has to look at the fact that the inheritance tax is indexed to inflation, while the minimum wage and teacher expense deduction aren't to understand where our national priorities are. I'm not willing to say "a high quality education for all just isn’t possible" until we've invested equivalent resources into education as waging war. Imagine if our education budget was $700 billion annually. What could be possible?