I wonder if the price of the Browning 1911-22 is higher than what this pistol, with the materials used, should go for.
Factors of production-cost of materials, labor costs, taxes, etc. only impact the minimum price of any item in a free market.
If you are talking about used guns, I've always thought it was funny that a Liberator is over $1k nowadays.
Literally the cheapest POS disposable gun possible..
These statements are purely socialist/communist lines of thinking. (I'm not calling anyone a socialist or a communist.) The free market uses supply and demand to set prices. The reason a Liberator is $1k is because there are so few surviving examples, yet, there are more people wanting them than there are available examples.
In a socialist/communist system, the supply is set by the government, which is famously inept at reading demand for an item, hence the widespread use of black markets. In a communist system, the only way to determine value is by the amount of labor put into production, hence a Liberator is a $1.00 gun: "...Literally the cheapest POS disposable gun possible..." and...I don't know, what's your favorite, overly complex, time consuming, gun to make? is $5k, even if no one wants to buy it. (In a free market, companies who make those kinds of products typically go out of business-not so in a government planned economy.)
If you are talking about new guns, labor prices have a lot to do with things, but its true there are a lot of companies that import guns made in places where labor rates are low and try to get away remarketing it under their own umbrella. Yea I'm talking to you, Springfield.
The market sets the value of Springfield Armory guns, as with any other item in the market, regardless if it's a rebadged item from another maker. I paid $400 for my XD-E, when it first came out. That was a price point where I saw value for a product I wanted and the company could make enough of a profit to cover their factors of production. That was, of course, a sale price of $100 off. At $500, I didn't see the value. I'd actually like to buy another, but even after having been discontinued, the local store is holding the price at $500. It has sat on their shelf for well over a year now. The gun is obviously overpriced at $500-not because I'm cheap and won't spend my money, but because
no one is buying at that price.
In the end the market sets the value of an object, regardless if you feel the total production costs are fairly represented in the price.
The total production costs only set the price floor. Companies won't make guns for a net loss. The only question to be asked and answered is "is there enough production to meet demand?" Yes? prices come down. No? Prices go up. Full auto NFA guns are a perfect example of this. There is
zero production since 1986. Sure, Thompson can build a sub machine gun for less than $25k (if they were allowed to), so why does a Thompson go for $25k? Because there aren't enough of them to meet demand. (I suspect that, deep down inside, owners of transferrable NFA guns really don't want to see the Hughes Amendment of the NFA repealed because of this.)