True. And some of the US founders seem to have genuinely believed that having money was a nice, legible, reasonably accurate proxy for merit & general fitness, and so, that they were founding a meritocracy. It's not as if everyone was setting out to do something bad, or even that, in the context of the time, what they did was particularly bad.

> seem to have genuinely believed that having money was a nice, legible

This is traditional right wing ideology, it has always been like this, only the excuses have changed.