Welcome to the Little Black Book of Bills project. This project was created as an effort to condense my views on libertarianism and possibly create a collaborative project with other libertarians. Get started at the Master Index after reading the Project Agenda. To help me out and become an editor, please read How to Participate.

The idea of this project is to outline viewpoints then draft legislation, based on the actual wording of the United States Code, that once passed into Congress would seriously reduce the overall size and scale of the United States Federal government. The ultimate aim of this project is to produce a body of work large enough to assist a libertarian government in running the United States Federal government if it, for whatever reason, had that opportunity. In the meantime, it is a creative and fun exercise for myself and whoever decides to join me.

Eventually I'd like this project to even be used as a reference point to illustrate to the rest of the population the plans and ideas libertarians have for our own government, allowing them insight on the choices libertarianism provides them, without needing to be knee-deep in the most hardcore libertarian circles.

Hi, my name is Phoebus Apollo. I created this project because I believe that a good government is based on good law. Currently, the U.S. Code is of an unmanageable size and it grows exponentially. Even the most highly trained legal experts have a problem navigating its weighty text, which when published each year takes up a whole series of encyclopedic volumes. In this situation it is hard for any individual or even group of people to fully understand even a fraction of the law which governs our nation, let alone all of it. This kind of massive legislation is grossly unnecessary for any form of government and detrimental to the citizens of our nation. It makes upholding the law difficult, it creates redundancies and contradictions, but most importantly the vast majority of law on the books today violates the Constitutional restrictions placed on Congress, and thus poses a serious threat to our rights.

Now, libertarians could assume that if they ever were in the position to "fix" things, that they could throw out the entire U.S. code and start over. However, much of our government's day-to-day operations and the expectations of our citizens doing business are tied to the details of our legal code. The best way to fix the problem is to use the powers of Congress to meticulously reform the law, to make it simpler. Doing this will make it more effective, and will most certainly reduce the size and scope of government in a healthy way.

However, doing this is no easy task. Libertarians differ on the details to solutions, and no political body will be taken seriously if they bicker over these very important details. This isolates the best thinkers from the main movement, and encourages people to spend time daydreaming of how it "could be". Documenting these daydreams and allowing a community of like-minded people to contribute to them could not only be useful in exploring the implications of those ideas but to create something practical and useful to the movement in the future.

I'd like to see, someday, a federal government whose laws are easy enough to understand that a short version of them can be kept in a little black book in my back pocket, and to have a fully detailed legal code no larger than the size of a single well-indexed encyclopedia. This would simplify all the federal legal procedures of the nation and ensure there isn't much room for corruption and abuse in enforcing the laws. Efficient lawmaking is important if we want a smaller government, and I think would assist the movement greatly to consider this.

Thanks for reading and please contribute where you see fit.

- PA