The idea of rights achieves concrete form through the living possession of property. So embodied, the soul that retains it more easily comprehends the abstract idea of rights of which property is the specific and familiar instance. The idea of rights is, so to speak, made flesh through the substantiation of property. From that site can derive a healthy understanding of rights, as well as of the law that safeguards them. By contrast, an unhealthy understanding of rights would derive from the unmediated idea of rights in general. From this bad infinity can only come a proliferation of rights that knows no boundaries, and which encumbers any and all finite political systems with burdens they are incapable of bearing. — Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom, p. 246