We don’t live in a meritocracy and we never have. Frankly, I don’t think we should aspire to it, either. There could never be a perfect arbiter of merit and any set of metrics one might choose to measure intrinsic value would be at least somewhat arbitrary and discriminatory. But we do want folks to get a fair shake and proper compensation and recognition for their work. We want to give the maximum number of people an opportunity to succeed.

When it comes to writing books, there are great authors who have to self-publish and great books that don’t sell because they aren’t properly promoted. Often an author is long dead by the time the world recognizes the timelessness of their creations. I don’t want to try to legislate away unfairness or unfortunate quirks of fate.

If a book sells, it obviously has value to people even if the reviewers think it’s crap. That’s meritocratic enough for me.

But it does seem wrong for authors to reach the best seller list through bulk purchases from their rich friends and political allies. And, as Paul Farhi of the Washington Post reports, bulk purchases of politicians’ books can also run afoul of campaign finance rules and ethics guidelines.

This seems to be common practice among Republican lawmakers, but there’s not much evidence of the Democrats doing the same. To give one example, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), spent nearly $400,000 on former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw’s book, Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage. This put it on the best seller list and helped him become an elected U.S. congressman representing a district in Texas. The NRCC claims it used these books to help fundraise for Crenshaw’s candidacy, but now he’s a best-selling author and some poor schlub was pushed off the list and won’t get as big of an advance for his or her next book.

To keep compliant with the law, the purchase was made straight from the publisher which made sure not to pay out royalties to Crenshaw since that would be a corrupt use of political fundraising money. Sen. Ted Cruz violated that law when used his own campaign’s money to buy his book in bulk from online retailers Books-a-Million and Barnes & Noble, neither of which is equipped to report to the publisher on which purchases should spur royalty payments and which should not. This means that Cruz will probably have to return the royalties to avoid legal problems. But he’ll still have benefited in other ways that don’t seem fair.

Believe me, I wish I could author a book and have friends and allies bulk purchase it onto the best seller list. That’s so much easier than making sales based on the merit of my work. But I recognize that the world isn’t fair and I’m not asking that anyone try to make it fair.

Still, I reserve the right to complain that conservative writers get this hand up routinely and it’s not something creative people on the left ever seem to enjoy.