I wonder if what good we see in capitalism is just the period of it when there's plenty of low hanging fruit for everbody.

What I mean is, we could praise a system where any guy can buy a cheap house, renovate it and call it his own. Now, take it to its logical conclusion and you'll soon have agents with access to credit leveraging all the capital to acquire every single flipable house out there and extracting maximum rent out of the people who would have got them renovated themselves in less "efficient" times.