[jacobn]

I read something slightly different into your metaphor: it's about pro-social, positive sum games vs zero/negative sum games.

The mouse is participating in the positive sum game of joint savings, and the cat is robbing it blind (very negative sum as it's also robbing its future self).

There's a lot of that happening across society (healthcare, education, addiction-fueled tech companies, ...), and the people who do it oftentimes do end up (at least short term) better off (= rich), but we as a nation end up poorer (the whole negative sum thing).

There are however plenty of ways to become rich doing positive sum things (though lord knows it's harder than it looks), so there will be rich people who don't deserve the blame so to speak.

But the clearly visible, media-amplified cases will of course be cartoonish villains, all too eager to sell you the rope to hang them with so to speak.