We are willing to be 80 percent right if it means being 100 percent understandable.

We are willing to be 80 percent right if it means being 100 percent understandable. That is a genuine trade, and I want to be honest that it is one — every rule here leaves some real-world case handled imperfectly.

Here is why I make the trade anyway. Every exception added to a rule is a handhold. Special interests do not usually beat a rule head-on; they find the clause written for a sympathetic edge case and widen it, patiently, over years, until it is the main road. Complexity is not neutral — it systematically advantages whoever can afford to hire people to live inside it.

The second reason is communicability. A rule you can say in one sentence can be repeated by a person who has read about it once. It can survive a campaign, a news cycle, a change in party control. A rule that takes a white paper to explain has no constituency, because nobody can carry it around. Being explainable is not a nicety; it is a durability property.

So when you find a case one of these rules handles badly — and you will — the first question is not "what exception fixes this?" It is "does this failure cost more than the erosion the exception would invite?" Sometimes the answer will be yes. Most of the time, in my experience, it is not.