California hasn’t created a railroad to the future but a warning to the rest of the country to avoid its delusion and folly. California progressives tried to build a European-style high-speed rail network and alienated the French in the process. A big New York Times piece on the rail project reports that the French, who wanted to work with California, decided the state was simply too dysfunctional and departed to help complete a high-speed line in Morocco instead. The ongoing unraveling of California’s rail plan is an object lesson in how infrastructure as eschatology is a bad idea. If transportation...