You may think that this Friday, Feb. 29th, is just a trick to bring the average days per year closer to the 365.25 days that it takes to revolve around the sun. But it may well be an unheralded libertarian festival.

Did you think it takes exactly 365 days for the Earth to do a solar loop? You're not alone—so did the ancient Egyptians. Although to be fair (to the Egyptians, not to you), they used a 365-day calendar because that happened to be the regular flooding schedule of the Nile river. (What's your excuse?) It resulted in their traditional summer months eventually becoming winter months before cycling back, all over a period of many hundreds of years.

Nevertheless, the Egyptian calendar was still one of the best. It had replaced at least partially the lunar calendar that they had experimented with before, and which still persists. The Hebrew calendar, the Chinese calendar, the Hindu calendar, and the Islamic calendar are all lunar even today.

How can those calendars survive if they are so wrong? The answer is leap months. All lunar calendars are so off, usually by about ten days a year, that they have to add a whole new month every two to three years.

There is one exception: The Islamic calendar does not have leap months. It is forbidden in the Koran. Instead, it simply starts eleven days earlier relative to our regular years.

(About three times a century, a Muslim year falls entirely within a regular year. Coincidentially, it's happening this year: What we know as 2008 incorporates the entirety of the Muslim year 1429.)

So what's a "regular" year? Technically, it's a Gregorian year, or sometimes a Julian year. Pope Gregory XIII made a mild modification in 1582 to a calendar that Julius Caesar had implemented in 45 BCE.

What did Caesar do two thousand years ago that was so stunningly impressive that it remained the standard calendar for virtually the entire world for so long?

And why did he do it?

Before Caesar's change, Rome was also on a lunar calendar. They had leap months that should have been followed on a fairly rigid schedule, much like the Hebrew, Chinese, and Hindu calendar do today, but the final decision was made by bureaucrats and politicians. As you might expect, they didn't always do what was right, but let politics interfere.

How arbitrary were the human-directed leap months? To cite Wikipedia, "They usually occurred every second or third year, but were sometimes omitted for much longer, and occasionally occurred in two consecutive years."

In times of war, leap months were sometimes entirely forgotten or done less frequently than needed to keep the year close to seasonal. This is not because it was unimportant. Quite the opposite: People desperately needed an accurate and consistent calendar. The last, failing years of the human-directed lunar calendar were known as the "years of confusion."

Here's where Caesar got libertarian. He thought that smaller government could be more stable and less confusing. So he decided to set it and forget it; make an algorithm, open-source it, and get the human element out of the way. He added a day or two to some of the lunar months Rome had been using. We still use these exact same months today.

That first step brought the total number of days per year up from 355 to 365. That's already pretty close! But he went one better than the ancient Egyptians. He added a single leap day, instead of an entire leap month, occurring exactly every four years.

That's it. One more function of government shut down, and the people were better off.

(Pope Gregory's contribution was to further adjust the leap day calculations with wrinkles for years divisible by 100. It turns out that the true year length is closer to 365.24 than 365.25. But it took about one and a half thousand years for it to make a significant difference.)

How many of our government functions are being neglected, just like leap months were, now that we are in a time of war? Education. Health care. Elderly benefits. Poverty aid. Even veterans are getting short shrift.

Perhaps it's time we made a Caesar's salad (named for an entirely different Caesar, mind you) out of our bloated government. Toss away the tomatoes and onions and other extras that we can each add to our salad to our own individual taste. Leave just the lettuce of a national defense, the cheese of justice, and the sauce of freedom. And please bring the salty anchovies of boring presidential primaries on the side. Some of us are allergic.