Bureaucrats like long and complex because they want to control everything in advance in minute detail. They have interpretive power without that. The contradictions in their long and complex give them both simultaneously.

The purpose of our government is to benefit itself and its minions. Any benefits to the citizens is totally accidental and unimportant.

By adding amendments and complications, a law can be made to do the opposite of its original intention.

The proliferation of laws filled with nonsense allows a person to be shown to disobey the law no matter what he does relative to it.

I agree. But I'd settle for 2 or 3 pages.
ASSOCIATES SHOULD ALWAYS CLOSE THE DOOR< OR SWEEP THE FLOOR IF THERE IS NO REQUIREMENT FOR TIDINESS. BUT MUST BE MADE SAFE FOR ALL TO WALK ON. This was a sign we put up on the wall of the cafeteria in a large manufacturing company. No comment was made until we started asking if anyone knew what it meant. Of course no one did, since it was gibberish. But, once questioned, a tide of inquiry arose demanding to know what it meant.

watch out for Ifs, and or buts.Whenever you see one of those , if or but, it is sure to be followed by a complication.

Nah, it's more perverse than that.
See, they dial for dollars, and make promises.
Then when the law is announced, those that gave money call in their chips. In some cases, they literally bid the paragraphs out to the special interests to get their "parts" in there. In most cases, it is a barrier to entry for their competitor.

I saw this first hand in SC where a salvage car lot owner PAID $$$ to get Environmental Standards raised, protecting against vehicle fluids getting into the ground water, and the ANNUAL Environmental impact studies, etc. Except any place in business for over 20yrs would be grandfathered in to NOT require this. Which just created an EXPENSIVE barrier to competition he foresaw coming from some of the big players (who would compete). It went through, and little places had to close... He raised his rates across the board, as he held a near monopoly.

Our elected officials RELY on the "industries" to help write the laws, which ensures this kind of crap, over and over. And as long as their donors are good to go, they vote for the bill. It the donors say no... The bill will NOT EVEN come up for a vote (Kates Law?)

Good one!

Rules, laws and contracts are food for thought. All are made by lawyers and designed to be argued by other lawyers thereby keeping all the lawyers well fed.

If a law cannot be written in 1 page or less (mostly in a simple phrase) it is to complicated and should not exist.

That is the principle in North Korea. Kim is aggrandized and takes credit for everything, and there is no dissention on that fact. Just a simpler way, they probably don't even need rules, he can just make them up as he sees fit as they coware to his every whim.

Well said. The reason bureaucrats love long and complex is because it gives them interpretive power. When things are simple and straightforward there is less opportunity for this. Note that I say less because the ideologues will go through all kinds of logical distortions to justify their interpretations to the contrary. Take the Second Amendment, for example.

In Washington, if you want to simplify the tax code by removing a tax deduction so that no one has to keep track of it anymore, the result is that the deduction remains in place but now has a threshold that has to be used in applying it -- thereby making it more complex.

It is often said of things written and spoken, the simpler the better and that equals smarter; whereas, complex, cumbersome and unintelligible shows a lack of smarts and a lack of understanding of the subject.

A mentor once stated and I rephrased in my own writings:
Man made rules are highly prejudicial, they punish the many, because of a few and in favor of a few but always to aggrandize the men that make the rules.

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival ....a survival of a hugely remote period when consciousness was manifested, perhaps , in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity....Forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods , monsters, mythical beings of all sorts And kinds.
Algernon Blackwood

I wish it would be a novel, it would have the possibility to be interesting enough to read.

200 pages is not a law it's a short novel or a list of
Clintons victims.