So say I’m buying a scope from company X which offers several different models/tiers in terms of quality and price. Top tier having less Chinese components and more comprised of parts from friendly countries or even the USA. Lower tiers being straight up Chinese.
I purchase that high tier scope feeling good about not supporting the Chinese economy/government. With my purchase and that of many other customers, Company X grows allowing them to invest more with their Chinese partners to develop and manufacture their low tier scopes which is probably what most average shooters buy.
At the same time, Company X is largely U.S. based and my purchase will also be directly supporting U.S. jobs.
Seems like maybe the only way to minimally support China in your optics buying decisions is with high end European, TT (Canadian right?) or ZCO. So ZCO is your answer.
Not a troll post. Just a little thought experiment. I’d love to have a ZCO someday. For now I’m quite happy with my Vortex’s. AMG, RZR I & II, PST I & II, and some other Chinese ones probably.
These companies will react to demand. Even though they resell alot of chicom junk, if demand drops for the Chinese stuff and increases for the US, Euro and Jap made stuff, you can bet they will buy/produce what is selling.
In my opinion, our government owns the biggest share of the blame here, not the consumer. The consumer is going to purchase what they perceive to be the best value for the dollar. For the average scope buyer, if they can see through it, its good enough. They don't need quality, or even know what it is.
As long as our governments policy is to allow tariff free imports of Chinese manufactured goods in exchange tariff free exports of farm goods, the Chinese slave labor imports will be the best deal for consumers. They have a comparitive advantage in manufacturing due to slave labor.
The challenge to bringing back manufacturing is that we will have to trade away some of our farming industry in order to get it back.
If our government raised the end user price of Chinese imports using tariffs, it would start bringing back domestic manufacturing. Of course China would retaliate with tariffs on our farmed goods. We would be trading one industry for another.
This has been known forever, and was done on purpose. Manufacturing is dirty, and farms comparatively clean. The decision was made to trade away our polluting industries for cleaner farms.
Examples of this were recently played out. When Trump started imposing tariffs on China, the US farm industry was the first and most vocal in crying foul. More local metal suppliers were carrying steel from US mills, but the prices were higher.
Our local dairy farms were pissed, because they are used to selling every gallon of milk they produced to China. Chinese demand for dairy dropped when they retaliated with tariffs.