It became vital back when economies first started to specialize.
If you take the net the fisherman wants to use and string it up as a hammock, you're going to eat fewer fish later. If you take the blacksmith's tongs and use them to crack walnuts, you're not going to get that handful of nails that you wanted to build your house.
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.
It should be obvious that you can't plant a field on the same land footprint as the foundation of your house. You can't build a road over it at the same time that it'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.
They are not absolutely essential 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.
In all your examples, you're talking about tools that would be finding direct use. How do you reconcile your allegories with empty houses purchased solely as stable investment vehicles instead of actually housing people?
That's just like the fishing net used as a hammock instead of catching fish. A house used for housing is a productive purpose. It is generating value to the economy every minute that it is being used as shelter for humans. That value diffuses out to more people through trade. When used for speculation, it is not producing value, but simply storing it for later use. Meanwhile, those who would otherwise produce value from it are producing less value in aggregate because they are denied access to at least one house.
If you put gold in a vault, it retains its value. But it cannot be used productively. If you instead loan the same gold out, you can charge interest, and some of the value generated by the gold performing its productive function as money will diffuse back to you via trade.
As a whole, the entire economy would prefer that all tools be put to productive use 24 hours a day. But the individual Nash equilibrium strategy is to selectively employ or withhold the use of those tools for greater personal benefit to the tool owner.
In the government's role as cartel enforcer, it would be in the interest of the whole cartel for the enforcer to levy a vacancy tax on investment properties. That reduces the personal benefit of idling the productive tool, but the enforcer then also has the burden of returning that value to the economy in a productive way.
If you take the net the fisherman wants to use and string it up as a hammock, you're going to eat fewer fish later. If you take the blacksmith's tongs and use them to crack walnuts, you're not going to get that handful of nails that you wanted to build your house.
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.
It should be obvious that you can't plant a field on the same land footprint as the foundation of your house. You can't build a road over it at the same time that it'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.
They are not absolutely essential 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.