During the 2008 global economic meltdown, people who wanted to know what had caused the crash became familiar with the “Minsky Moment”: the commonsense theory, developed by economist Hyman Minsky, that good times create bad times. If the housing market goes up for long enough, investors feel that it will always continue to go up. This complacency feeds speculation that ends in collapse. Now, the gleeful piling on over the (admittedly bad) bedside manner of Mayor Pete — Pete Buttigieg, President Joe Biden’s hapless Department of Transportation secretary — in East Palestine, Ohio, obscures the fact that we’re having a Minsky Moment in regulated transportation: It’s been so safe for so long that it’s becoming unsafe. Free market fundamentalists may wish otherwise, but rail and air transportation, just like financial markets, are not free market industries,...