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"I've never had a case like this before, ever," Lewisville police detective Gina Miller said.

Dylan Larkin was given an icy welcome from Red Wings fans on Friday.

Prices are crazy in California. But then again, so are we.

North Korea fired a ballistic missile from Wonsan on Saturday amid tensions over border land mine blasts that injured three South Korean soldiers.

The FDA found cyclospora at a Mexican farm linked to a Taylor Farms lettuce outbreak that sickened nearly 13,000 people across the U.S.

The federal government has reduced its workforce by 300,000 jobs since Jan. 20, 2025, bringing it down to a still-bulky 2.7 million employees.

DOJ Won't Defend Suppressor Registry In Court After Congress Killed The $200 Tax

The Justice Department has now made it official: it will not defend part of the 92-year-old National Firearms Act in court, confirming what we reported in August.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer told Congress that "the Department of Justice has determined not to file an appeal" in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, the case in which a federal judge ruled that NFA registration requirements for suppressors and short-barreled rifles and shotguns are unconstitutional now that the tax behind them is gone. The letter, addressed to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and dated Sept. 24, was made public this week.

The NFA has required owners of suppressors and short-barreled guns to pay a $200 tax and register with the federal government since 1934. President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill eliminated that tax for suppressors and short-barreled rifles and shotguns, but left the registration requirement in place. Gun rights groups sued, arguing that a registry justified by Congress's taxing power can't survive once there's no tax to collect.

On Aug. 5, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas agreed, finding the challenged provisions could no longer be sustained under Congress's taxing power and rejecting the government's fallback argument that the interstate commerce power could save them. The case was consolidated with Jensen v. ATF.

The injunction protects the plaintiffs and their "current and future members and customers," not the general public. The covered groups include Gun Owners of America, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, FPC Action Foundation and the Texas State Rifle Association, according to Bearing Arms. Machine guns, destructive devices and the NFA's special occupational tax are not covered at all.

The result is a two-tier Second Amendment. If you hold the right membership card, the federal registry no longer applies to your suppressor. If you don't, nobody in Washington will say. "The DOJ has yet to release any guidance about how the court's decision will impact the NFA's registration requirements for those who fall outside the protection of the injunction," Bearing Arms' Cam Edwards wrote.

The court granted DOJ a 10-day extension, to Oct. 12, to respond to nine plaintiff states asking whether the injunction covers all of their residents or only members and customers of the plaintiff groups, and ATF Director Robert Cekada has said guidance on transfers and interstate travel is coming "within weeks."

Republicans on the Hill want the department to go further. In August, Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia led 46 House members and 8 senators in urging Attorney General Todd Blanche not only to skip the appeal but to apply the ruling nationwide through rulemaking, warning that "an appeal would prolong regulatory uncertainty for law-abiding gun owners and businesses and would consume DOJ resources."

Whether the nationwide relief they asked for arrives, in the Oct. 12 filing or ATF's promised guidance, will decide whether gun owners outside the covered groups are still committing a federal felony by skipping paperwork for a tax that no longer exists.

* * *

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 21:20

Judge Kathleen Cardone temporarily blocked the Trump administration from building a border wall across Texas’ Big Bend region.

The rapper shut down the store in Burbank, California, so he could shop with his kids.

The rapper shut down the store in Burbank, California, so he could shop with his kids.

Alasdair Keane heads to the Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco.

Shohei Ohtani is still not 100%. But has he made enough progress to make an impact in the playoffs?

"Please be kind to our operators and transit team as they navigate this unimaginable tragedy."

When Regulation Changes Who Becomes Rich

Authored by Shahid Islam via RealClearMarkets,

Economic debates about inequality usually begin with a familiar question: Who has how much income?

It is an important question. But perhaps it is not the only one we should be asking.

A society can change who becomes rich without substantially changing how unequal the society is. Regulation can weaken one economic elite while creating opportunities for another. Entrepreneurs and investors may lose relative influence while lawyers, compliance specialists, lobbyists, consultants and regulatory experts gain it.

The Gini coefficient may barely notice.

Income distribution and income-source distribution are not the same thing.

Regulation does more than redistribute income. It changes the relative returns to different kinds of knowledge and human capital. And when those returns change, talented people respond.

Elite Substitution

Imagine an economy in which high returns come primarily from producing things consumers voluntarily buy. Entrepreneurs search for new products, engineers improve production and investors search for promising companies.

Now introduce an increasingly complex regulatory system.

Those activities do not disappear. But another set of skills becomes more valuable: interpreting regulations, satisfying disclosure requirements, obtaining government permissions, anticipating political decisions and influencing the rules themselves.

The relevant question is not simply whether regulation reduces inequality. It is what happens to the return from creating economic value relative to the return from navigating political and regulatory institutions.

If intervention reduces the return to one form of economic power while increasing the return to another, we may get what I call elite substitution.

The elite does not disappear. Its composition changes.

Sarbanes-Oxley and the Fixed Cost of Complexity

Consider the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Following Enron and WorldCom, Congress sought to strengthen financial reporting and restore investor confidence. But compliance costs are not necessarily proportional to firm size.

A large corporation and a small public company may both need auditors, lawyers, internal-control systems and compliance personnel. The large company can spread those expenses across billions of dollars of revenue. The smaller company cannot.

GAO research has found that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs, although generally higher in absolute terms for larger companies, are proportionately more burdensome for smaller companies. GAO also found that companies moving from exempt to nonexempt status experienced a median increase of about $219,000, or 13 percent, in audit fees in the year of transition.

Sarbanes-Oxley did not cause the rise of private equity by itself. But increasing the fixed cost of public ownership changes the relative attractiveness of public and private organizational forms.

That matters because public markets allow ordinary investors to participate directly in corporate growth, while many private-market opportunities have historically been concentrated among institutional and accredited investors.

Regulation intended partly to protect ordinary investors can therefore inadvertently encourage some activity to migrate toward markets to which those same investors have less access.

Who Can Afford the Maze?

I saw another version of this phenomenon while working in the wealth-management industry before 2008.

I remember a rule of thumb concerning sophisticated offshore trusts: they generally became economically worthwhile only for estates of roughly $75 million or more. The precise threshold varied, but the economics was straightforward.

Lawyers, accountants, trustees and other specialists were expensive. Below a sufficiently large asset level, the cost could exceed the benefit.

That experience taught me something important:

Complexity has a fixed cost.

A $100 million household can economically justify sophisticated legal and tax strategies whose professional costs would make little sense for an ordinary household.

The same principle applies to businesses. A small company may struggle to employ one regulatory specialist. A multinational corporation can maintain entire departments of attorneys, accountants, lobbyists and compliance professionals.

Rules may formally apply equally while imposing very unequal economic burdens.

This creates a paradox. Regulation intended to constrain powerful economic actors can sometimes increase their relative advantage because they possess the resources necessary to navigate the resulting complexity.

We have not necessarily eliminated privilege. We may simply have changed its technology.

Dodd-Frank and Yesterday's Crisis

The same issue appears in banking.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Dodd-Frank increased the importance of compliance officers, attorneys, risk specialists, consultants, programmers and regulatory analysts. A Government Accountability Office study found that community banks, credit unions and industry associations reported increased staffing, training, employee time and compliance-system expenditures associated with selected Dodd-Frank rules.

The obvious defense is that this activity may prevent another financial crisis. If so, its social return could be enormous.

But that argument contains a difficult knowledge problem.

Major financial regulations are often responses to observed failures. Sarbanes-Oxley followed Enron and WorldCom. Dodd-Frank followed the financial crisis.

But the next crisis need not resemble the last one.

Financial institutions adapt. Capital moves. Technology changes. New products appear and risks migrate. The Federal Reserve's financial-stability framework itself acknowledges that shocks are inherently difficult to predict and therefore focuses primarily on monitoring vulnerabilities rather than predicting particular shocks.

This does not mean regulation produces no benefits. Higher capital, greater liquidity and improved risk controls may make institutions safer.

But the costs are relatively visible: compliance departments, legal expenses, reporting systems and management time. One of the largest claimed benefits - the crisis that did not happen - is much harder to observe.

The economic question is whether the marginal resources devoted to regulation make the financial system sufficiently safer to justify their opportunity cost.

The ACA and the Value of Political Knowledge

The Affordable Care Act illustrates another side of the same phenomenon.

The ACA changed subsidies, insurance rules, reimbursement arrangements and government-financed coverage. These changes affected expected revenues and profits throughout the healthcare industry.

Economists Mohamad Al-Ississ and Nolan Miller examined Scott Brown's surprise 2010 Massachusetts Senate victory, which reduced the perceived probability that the pending healthcare legislation would survive in its expected form.

They found striking differences. Managed-care firms experienced abnormal returns of about 6 percent, pharmaceutical companies about 2.8 percent, while healthcare facilities experienced abnormal losses of about 3.5 percent.

This does not prove that these gains and losses were political rents. A hospital could become more valuable under expanded insurance simply because more patients could pay their bills.

But it demonstrates something important:

Government rules can change expected private cash flows sufficiently that political events become capitalized into asset prices.

Once the government determines reimbursement formulas, subsidies and eligibility rules, understanding government becomes part of business strategy.

Political knowledge acquires economic value.

And when political decisions can create or destroy substantial corporate value, firms rationally devote resources to anticipating, navigating and influencing those decisions.

What the Gini Coefficient Cannot See

Imagine two economies with identical income distributions.

In one, high incomes depend primarily upon success in markets. In the other, they depend much more heavily upon successfully navigating political and regulatory institutions.

The Gini coefficient could be identical.

The economies would not be.

This is why inequality statistics tell us only part of the story. We measure how much income people receive but rarely ask enough about what activities generate that income.

None of this establishes that regulation necessarily makes society poorer. Preventing fraud, improving disclosure or correcting genuine externalities can create social value. Elite substitution and a smaller economic pie are separate propositions.

But every society has unusually talented and ambitious people. The important question is what institutions reward them for doing.

Do they receive the highest returns from inventing products, building companies and allocating capital successfully?

Or increasingly from mastering the rules governing those activities?

People respond to incentives. Economists have understood that for centuries. There is no reason the principle should stop operating when the government enters the picture.

Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act addressed very different problems and may have produced important benefits. But all three raise a question conventional discussions of inequality often overlook:

When the government changes the rules, does it eliminate economic privilege - or merely change who is best positioned to capture it?

And when talented people discover that navigating the rules offers greater rewards than creating value outside them, we should ask one final question:

Did we redistribute the pie - or did we also make it smaller?

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 20:55

"I have loved you every second of your life & will miss you every second of mine. What a sweet sweet reunion ours will be."

“I don’t want to see you up here, I understand the view is nice but there’s no reason to be up here right now," NYPD ESU Detective Giordani says.

Team Trump isn't just trusting Sam Altman & Co. to do the right thing.

The Vikings will be without their top receiver for Sunday's game against the Dolphins.

Officials have yet to reveal how the men died or whether anyone is suspected of killing them.

While the 49ers won the battle against the Cardinals last Sunday, it came with a brutal injury to top free-agent acquisition Mike Evans. Evans was carted off during the second quarter after taking a hit in the ribs from Budda Baker. Evans missed the rest of the game. San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Mike Evans...