Different people will not do equally well on any given task. This is why we bother to select people for their positions and don't give them out via lottery.

Overall letting people compete by choosing in any way they see fit should reward those who choose rationally. Which should help us create more "wealth" than otherwise. Yes there are cases of tragedies of the commons where government intervention might be warranted, so as to limit choice, frack that's the whole reason government is a good idea! But such limitations of freedom need to be overwhelmingly proven not just to work against a identified tragedy of the commons situation, but to be cost effective.

Wealth redistribution in order to help those who are unfortunate enough to have lost their bet get another chance at betting or the below average to get intelligence enhancements/training/treatment/whatever will improve their performance is something I would firmly support however I think job distribution is a very poor way of doing this, it seems intuitively obvious that it reduces the overall amount of wealth a society has.

In my original post I say government should be blind on some axis or should even give positive discrimination, this is because government isn't usually in the business of wealth creation and because there are some zero sum benefits with holding a certain position in society and in most places on the planet there is a popular bias in terms of perceiving power and prestige in favor of government.

For the time being this seems a good bias to exploit for increasing general welfare by redistributing zerosum goods (feelings of power, prestige, fame) while making as small a negative impact on the positive sum games that make everyone's life better (the creation of material goods, information accrual, ect.).

I use equality of opportunity as a shorthand for meritocracy with a strong culture and support (be it government programs or private charity) for everyone's self-improvement.