Now your life is mussed up with a lot more stuff. You've got license fees and number plates and gas and oil and taxes and insurance and identification cards and letters and bills and flat tires and dents and traffic tickets and courtrooms and lawyers and fines. You're not the free and happy guy you used to be. You gotta have money to pay for all those things. So you go after what the other guy has got.
Ownership is painted as bringing about an overwhelming burden of unforeseen consequences.
Autos have long been noted as the second most-expensive undertaking made by an average person. Peter Reiher wanted to know about propaganda in films written by members of the Hollywood Ten. Elsewhere in the film, Tom Neal scores big on the drugstore pinball machine, and asks for 90 cents cash for the 18 free games he won. It paid off. Lardner, through Neal's character, has invented his own interpretation of the rules, an interpretation that flies in the face of the facts, and is now trying to impose his interpretation on the rest of the world.