The Reason article makes a case I am glad to see made: that private property is not the exclusive preserve of the already-wealthy, but the institutional foundation on which any person — however modest their beginning — can accumulate, plan, and exchange. I endorse the sentiment. But the argument, as presented in the lead, stops one step short of where it must go.

A property right is only as strong as the institution that enforces it. When I observed, in The Wealth of Nations, that the security of property is the first condition of productive industry, I meant the actual security — not the formal declaration of it. A tenant farmer whose title cannot survive the challenge of a well-connected neighbor has no property right in any meaningful sense, whatever the statute may say. The poor are, historically, the first to discover how little a right on paper is worth when the courts are slow, corrupt, or simply inaccessible to those without counsel.

This is why the liberal argument for property rights must be an argument for institutional investment simultaneously. Defense, justice, and the machinery of civil contract are what I called the proper duties of the sovereign — public goods that no private party will supply at the scale the market requires, because no single purchaser can capture the full benefit. A registry of titles, an accessible civil court, a profession of lawyers operating under ethical constraint: these are not the enemies of property; they are its preconditions.

The article's claim that stronger property rights benefit the poor and disadvantaged is, on the evidence of history, broadly correct — but only where the institutional framework is itself honest and accessible. Hernando de Soto's later work on informal property in developing economies (inference, not recollection on my part) illustrates precisely the mechanism I would have predicted: when the poor cannot formalize their holdings, they cannot use them as collateral, cannot sell them openly, and cannot defend them in court. The right exists; the institution does not follow it.

I would therefore press the Reason argument in this direction: do not merely advocate for stronger property rights in the abstract. Ask, concretely, whether the courts are funded, whether title registration is universal and cheap, whether legal aid extends to those who cannot afford a retainer. A property right is a social fact before it is a legal one, and social facts require maintenance. The invisible hand moves only within a framework of visible institutions — and building those institutions is not a concession to the enemies of liberty. It is liberty's own work.