What government can learn from Moore's Law: to make Washington more like Silicon Valley, we need expiration dates on legislation.

• Author: de Rugy, Veronique
• Position: Columns - Column

IN A FIT of nostalgia, I recently watched You've Got Mail with my II-year-old daughter (don't judge me!). For those who haven't seen the 1998 chick flick, it tracks the first antagonistic, later tender, interactions between an independent bookseller (Meg Ryan) and the owner of a corporate bookstore chain (Tom Hanks) that just moved in across the street. As movie fate would have it, Ryan and Hanks develop an anonymous Internet romance even as his megastore is putting her little shop out of business.

To the modern eye, the technology in the film appears almost comically outdated: dial-up Internet connections, phones attached to answering machines, people getting their news from actual newspapers. In fact, the movie's plot wouldn't make sense today, given the plethora of online dating services and applications like FaceTime and Snapchat that allow for deeper, more intimate online communication than was available in the '90s.

The movie is also a reminder that exciting new technologies and the business models that sustain them are unlikely to dominate forever. However great an innovation, eventually, it may be replaced by something better, faster, or cheaper. Viewers in 1998 couldn't be blamed for thinking big chains like Hanks' Fox Books would permanently dominate the bookselling industry. In reality, the upstart online book retailer Amazon was already on its way to the top of the food chain. Remember Borders, Waldenbooks, or B. Dalton? Today in the world of brick-and-mortar bookstore giants, only Barnes & Noble remains.

In an open marketplace, a business that doesn't evolve to offer better goods and services at ever-more-affordable prices simply won't survive. That reality is particularly well-understood in places like Silicon Valley, which has been shaped by a folk understanding of Moore's Law, named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who first observed in the 1970s that the number of transistors that fit on a computer chip doubles every two years, yielding cheaper and more powerful computers at a rapid rate. The result is a world in constant motion where risktaking is rewarded almost above all else.

"In today's fast-paced information age, everyone is expected to be constantly innovating and reinventing their business at the speed of'Moore's Law,"' my Mercatus colleague Adam Thierer says. "Firms have to tear up their business plans every couple of years."

But while virtually all industries are engaged in a constant race to meet consumer...