"wasteful capitalism" is a lot like open source software, or biological evolution.  what you perceive as waste is available energy expressed in diversity, from which selection occurs.  it is wasteful in the sense that creativity is wasteful, and search over the solution space has a cost.  avoiding those search costs often implies much more catastrophic forms of waste.  a species which does not adapt eventually loses its niche, and goes extinct, because it avoided "wasteful" search.

it is also worth noting that a substantial share of the total costs are themselves "bullshit"  (edit: as I see another poster observed in follow-up, in good detail) and caused by corrupted taxation, monies funneled to cronies and backers of the political establishment, justified as social costs.