It depends what you mean by that.

If I buy a product and it comes with too much packaging, I'd say that's wasteful. It very quickly goes in the waste or recycling but doesn't provide much economic or social value.

If I buy a newspaper every day and recycle it at the end of the day, I'm not sure that's necessarily wasteful. I've enjoyed reading the paper (I wouldn't buy it otherwise) and for as long as that's my preferred way of reading it does create economic and social value.

If I buy a new iPhone every year it's because I value it. The old phone, which probably still works, gets passed on to someone else. By buying new technology regularly I keep providing the incentive and market for technology to develop and for technology companies to employ people, pay their taxes, etc. That's a good thing.

Now some industrial processes are excessively polluting. That causes harm so it should be minimised. But that's not the same as wastefulness.

I think you need to distinguish between lifestyle choices that are pleasant or expedient on an individual level and those that can scale up. Frugalism when done through choice rather than necessity is a rejection of the market economy, technological development and social progress. If small numbers of people do that it only really affects them. If large numbers of people do it then our children will grow up in a society where their life expectancy is under 40, where they'll be expected to marry their cousins when they're 12 and where they can get executed for blasphemy or for disrespecting the Big Boss. I'll pass on that if it's all the same.

The future is large-scale urbanism, energy-efficient housing and infrastructure, high value and highly specialised work and an individual commitment to quality over quantity, and technological and social progress. Call it minimalism if you like — the name isn't really that important. What's important is identifying the problems you're trying to solve at scale and reconciling that with individual lifestyles that are lives worth living. Frugalism is fine for a small number of individuals with negative ambition but definitely not an idea that I'd like to see get wider adoption.

But the cheap log cabin can only be build dodging building inspectors and regulations and sail boats are notorious money pits.

Each to their own, but research costs before you commit.

I don't follow your frugalism logic at all though. For instance, I recently received an iPhone 3 someone in my family no longer needed. I don't have AT&T service, but use it to check email and even make Skype calls. This is an example of frugality in my opinion. If we all were frugal, most likely things would be built to last—pots and pans would last 500 years and be handed down through the generations, homes would be built to last 1000 years or more, etc.

I do think frugality is often opposed to the latest and greatest technological inventions, but it need not be anti-technology. For instance, Mark Hurst's book Bit Literacy is pro-tech but very frugal in its recommendations of how to deal with information, saying "let the bits go."

Frugalists do in fact live off of other people's hand-me-downs, but this doesn't mean they are parasites. Without bacteria that lives off of dead animals we'd be living in a sea of dinosaur bones! I do think however that there is a symbiotic relationship between those who are more frugal and those who are less frugal in society, but our society in general is MASSIVELY, OUTRAGEOUSLY wasteful. We already live as if we have 100 Earths, and things are only getting worse.

Frugality is a bit more tricky. While there are times when some individuals need to be frugal to make ends meet, if everyone does it you cause a great deal of harm. If we all retreat to log cabins in the woods we'll have no more computers, phones, transport infrastructure, advanced medical care, university education and all the other good stuff we take for granted. We'll have shorter lifespans too. Individuals can do what they like but as a society we need to keep investing in the good technology that moves things forward.

So frugalists are really just living off everyone else's hand-me-downs. But without average consumers, there would be no hand-me-downs and frugalists would be reduced to a very basic subsistence lifestyle without the sophisticated technological safety net that they currently take for granted. It really all comes down to divisions of labour. You can clean your own windows, or you can work at a job and pay a window cleaner to do your windows. The frugalist is destroying two jobs (his own and the window cleaner's) and the worker is supporting two jobs. I know which creates more happiness in the long run.
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Having real jobs would make all of self-help writing a lot better IMHO.