Are you saying that someone being given an economic advantage by their parents means that their accomplishments have less merit? I'm not trying to straw man you, I'm just having trouble parsing your argument.
I think there's clearly a spectrum. Giving your kid $100K while my kid gets only $25K doesn't make the society not a meritocracy, even though your kid got 4x as much. If your kids gets $100K and mine gets $100M and then we see what happens, I agree that that's not a meritocracy with respect to those two families.
Personally, I came from a family of public schoolteachers. Even though many families had many millions more than we did, I think our society, as experienced by the median and mode citizens, is far more a meritocracy than a plutocracy.
Does everyone get a full reset and the exact same starting point as everyone else, as if life were a board game? No, of course not. Would the world be better if it worked that way? It would undeniably be more "fair", but I think less desirable.
> Are you saying that someone being given an economic advantage by their parents means that their accomplishments have less merit?
The fact that accomplishments are contributed to by material advantages supplied by parents (and more generally the network people are born and raised into and in) means that those accomplishments are less due to individual merit. The total contribution is 100%, so more of one contribution is less of the other.
>Are you saying that someone being given an economic advantage by their parents means that their accomplishments have less merit?
Yes. Being raised in a world where your physical needs are never even remotely considered is without question the single most important factor that leads to radically different outcomes in life.
They already get a lot of advantages during their life because of the position and wealth of their parents.
Is it bad to leave things for your kids? Nope, it's completelhy natural. But you can't claim that the society where that happens is a meritocracy.