> When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.
There is an extent to which it is true (well, the first part, not wage labor!), but it's a different set of property realtions than the ones which are the defining feature of capitalism.
> Same story if the lord has a mill and charges people to use it. Or a bridge and charges people to cross it. Technology was worse, so there weren't as many physical forms of capital, but it definitely existed.
Feudalism is also a system by which value is extracted by property relationships; a different set than capitalism, and (while some quantity of wage labor may exist within feudalism) not one where wage labor plays a central role.
Capitalism replaced the system of property relations underlying feudalism with a different set.
> Some people seem to have this need to see capitalism as this invention created by bad people.
Traditionally, that's not even how the socialist critics that first identified it viewed it; it wasn't “an invention created by bad people”, but the state resulting from a number of related changes to the model of property driven by a combination of opportunity created by physical and other social technologies and self-interested people seeking their own gain. (This isn't inherently bad, the same people saw socialism the same way, though they saw the class driving and benefiting the preservation of capitalism against further change as narrow and inherently narrowing with the continuance of capitalism.)
I'm not really sure, then, what people you are referring to, since neither capitalism's defenders nor it's main critics hold the view you are attacking.