Discussion Main / PersonalGainHurts

In a lot of works, there seems to be no distinction drawn between innocent self-improvement and actual acts of malice. For example, let's say you're a character in one of these works, and you want to use your powers to help you obtain a new car, for your own benefit. Depending on what exactly your powers are, there are many ways in which you might be able to do this, such as:

1. Magically teleporting someone else's car into your garage, and the keys into your hand.

2. Conjuring counterfeit money and using it to buy a car.

3. Conjuring a brand new car directly, or creating it by transmuting something else.

4. Selling your powers as a service for profit, and using the proceeds to buy a car.

The mundane equivalent of each of these examples might be, respectively:

1. Using your exceptional stealth skills to steal someone's car keys when they aren't looking, and driving their car home.

2. Using your exceptional knowledge of legal tender to print undetectable counterfeit money, and spending it on a car.

3. Using your exceptional mechanical skills to build your own car from raw materials.

4. Selling any service you're exceptionally skilled at, charging a premium to profit off the fact that you're one of if not the best at doing that job, and using the proceeds to buy a car.

Pretty much anyone will tell you that, of those examples, the first two are immoral, but the last two are perfectly fine. But in many works, using the superpowered equivalent of any of them would be treated as evil, simply because you used your powers with the goal of benefiting yourself.

And this brings me to my question. Let's say there's a work that isn't like that, but this trope otherwise applies. That is, using your powers to steal a car or whatever is punished, but you're fine if you can just conjure the car from nothing without taking it from anyone else. Would this trope apply to that work? Or is a necessary element of this trope that it applies even to (what a reasonable person would consider) non-malicious self-benefit?

I'd just like to take this opportunity to say how disturbing it is that there are so few examples to display.