It's an artifact of my phrasing. In my experience, people do truly want good things, until those things become universally available - at which point they switch goals to something zero-sum. When they do so, they often phrase it themselves as if they really wanted the zero-sum thing all along, but that's often a part of trying to distance themselves from their lower-status past.

Of course, I'm describing something that I only have personal and anecdotal evidence for; I'd REALLY like to be pointed towards either a legitimate, peer-reviewed description of a cognitive bias that would explain what I'm observing. (And I'd be at least equally happy if it turned out to be my cognitive bias that's causing me to perceive people in this way.)