I frankly don’t know why the US government has through several administrations put up with the Chinese government’s tolerance—even encouragement—of massive counterfeiting of intellectual property. They steal software, music, movies, books (there actually was a Chinese Harry Potter counterfeit), and yes, golf equipment.
An article in GolfWorld puts the value of the counterfeit golf products at $240 million or so, but the actual cost is more. Companies suffer from damaged reputations, and have to expend piles of cash protecting their name.
Legitimate sellers also take a hit on these. When counterfeiting becomes prevalent enough, the second hand market will entirely come under suspicion and dry up.
If the problem were just in golf, I might be able to understand why the US government chooses to ignore it. But every industry has been hit by these (primarily Chinese) criminals. And the economic damage is probably incalculable. Someone in Washington needs to develop a backbone and start standing up against the Chinese for US companies and citizens.
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I prefer not to even think about not just the Chinese counterfeits, but the overall trade imbalance. While there is a cost related to the chinese counterfeiting and piracy, overall I think it pales in comparison to the harm to our economy of the massive trade imbalance.
And as far as that goes, you often cannot even buy American if you wanted to. The “look for the union label” thing is just a distant memory now that probably nobody under 35 even remembers.
People look at me like I am an idiot when I say that I prefer to buy domestic cars, they point out that the bulk of the “imports” are actually made in America, they don’t get that the profits and so much of the management and other expenses all go to Japan or Germany (plus the quality imbalance between GM & Ford vs. Japanese & German cars is long a thing of the past).
Miranda is somewhat right in that our government doesn’t want to go after China for they could call in the debt—but China isn’t the only debt holder—and it is much bigger than that too—the corporations do not really want to crack down on China. Adidas & Nike in particular have no interest in angering China among the big golf companies.