It became vital back when economies first started to specialize.<p>If you take the net the fisherman wants to use and string it up as a hammock, you&#x27;re going to eat fewer fish later.  If you take the blacksmith&#x27;s tongs and use them to crack walnuts, you&#x27;re not going to get that handful of nails that you wanted to build your house.<p>Property rights alleviate the tragedy of the commons, by taking resources with multiple possible uses out of the commons and dedicating them to uses other than just the one with the highest immediate value.<p>It should be obvious that you can&#x27;t plant a field on the same land footprint as the foundation of your house.  You can&#x27;t build a road over it at the same time that it&#x27;s under an apartment building.  Property rights are part of our system for resolving the conflicts behind multiple competing exclusive uses for any particular thing.<p>They are not <i>absolutely essential</i> to democracy, but they are the best solution we have yet tried for resource allocation in a specialized economy, and democracies tend to fare better when there is enough prosperity to spread around to everyone.