Amen!
The Road to Productive Wealth
The only true key to wealth lies in production. While you can increase your own wealth at the expense of others, we all become wealthier when productive resources are increased. Greater wealth for our economy lies in increasing the quantity or quality of productive resources -- labor, capital, and natural resources. This is done by investing in education, capital goods, research and development, and technology.
Fundamentally, we believe that the U.S. government needs to devote more resources and put in place new programs to build wider expertise about China and to protect our industrial base from eroding as a result of our economic relations with China.
-- C. Richard D’Amato, chairman
U.S.-China Security Review Commission
(How to improve U.S.-China relations )
According to free market economics, there is ONE single determinant of standards of living in a nation: The per capita capital investment in domestic labor.
The things you quote - education, capital goods, R&D, technology - are all in line with that.
Every policy, not just economic policy, needs to be run through a single minded filter: Will it increase or at least not decrease per capita capital investment in domestic labor? And if it would tend to depress such investment, such policy ought to be rejected outright.
Free trade (i.e., division of labor) without the rights and responsibilities of statehood ought to be rejected outright.