The American Spectator

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Special Report

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Putting up trade barriers, however, will only make things worse. What we need is to move forward. The model that is working best is to combine university-based research with commercial enterprises for the creation of new industries and new jobs. North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, built in the 1950s around three major universities, has become the hub of the regional economy, moving the former "tobacco state" from the bottom of the economic ladder to the upper tier -- even as the old textiles mills were leaving.

Almost every state is now imitating this pattern. Albany has become the chip-manufacturing capital of the world by marrying the SUNY Albany Nanotechnology Center to IBM. Even North Dakota recently became a new technology center by landing a branch of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at the University of North Dakota. Matthew Goldstein, chancellor of New York's City University and an accomplished mathematician, is proposing a similar facility for the abandoned Coast Guard center on Governors Island in New York Harbor.

These are the kind of efforts that will move the country forward, creating new jobs and a high value for American labor. If people such as Senator Schumer, Paul Craig Roberts, and even Senator Kerry would get behind such imaginative projects, they wouldn't have to look back over their shoulders, fretting every time some perfect-English-speaking voice picks up an 800 line in Bombay.

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