Needs Help: Why We Cant Have Nice Things

As I stated on Trope Talk: "Why We Can't Have Nice Things seems to be a weird mashup of two ideas: it's about valuable items getting destroyed, and it's also about someone's misbehavior resulting in unrelated innocent people losing privileges. Most of the trope description points to the latter interpretation but there's also a paragraph about the former, and the examples seem to go back and forth. Not sure what's going on here or if maybe it should be split." It's also been commented that the title is a Stock Phrase which does not help matters.