They produced capital that they used to purchase housing so that others didn't have to go into six or even seven figure debt for it.

Or they inherited the capital or bought the property with gains from other activities they didn't have to work for, like investing in the stock market or refinancing other real estate. Aside from that a lot of houses are owned by businesses.

And even if you have this idyllic view that people work hard to buy a property, after that they still make money by doing nothing.

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They then maintain that housing and repair what goes bad.

Even if they do the maintenance themselves (often landlords hire other people to work for them) other people are paying of the mortgage and in most cases they make money by doing nothing because of rising house prices.

Again, what's the alternative? No housing unless you can get a mortgage?

I don't see why I have to come up with an alternative to be able to criticize the current system. Like I said it is very hard to imagine another system when the starting point is the capitalist system we have today.

But since you asked. What if we would have grown up in a world where housing was like a road; owned publicly and paid by taxes?

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Care to give an example?

In countries in Europe where education is (almost) free people still choose to study Medicine instead of IT, when studying to become a MD takes often more than twice as long (with unpaid internships) and get paid less than an IT professional for example.

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Sure there are people who go into that field to help others, but it sure as hell isn't a majority. Usually the alternative those people have isn't better.

It's not only about helping people vs helping themselves. People go into fields because of a lot of reasons like personal interest, their capacities, where they live, etc.

Again thinking that people mostly do things to better themselves is a really negative way to look at humanity and it's simply not true.

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Yeah, it is hard because a better system has never existed. And I don't really see a better alternative from what you've said. Neither socialism or communism have been able to provide quality housing for everyone - quite the opposite, actually.

Looking at the state of the world, it is pretty sad to conclude that this is the best system that has ever existed. What most people view as socialism and especially communism have never been successful because they always had to compete with the rest of the (capitalist) world and were never fully developed.

Capitalism is running on it's last legs, maybe when can come up with a better system be it socialism, communism or maybe something else.