Doing the Mumbo Jumbo

The Friday File: Bureaucrats write regulatory orders that are generally incomprehensible because they try to obscure the fact that they’re forbidding you from doing what you want. Occasionally, a top regulator will force his/her agency to write in plain English. But, it doesn’t last because incomprehensibility creates bureaucratic invisibility. Thus, slowly standards of vagueness necessarily return to what they were originally resulting in yet more unintelligible language.