What can make New York grow? Not FEMA money. Not mercantilist subsidies for individual firms. And not one-time stimulus packages, passed out of grudging pity. Their effect evaporates, after a couple of monumental buildings, into a mist of inefficiency.

No, only one thing can make New York grow: Opportunity. And the entrepreneur’s chance to exploit that opportunity by trading whenever, and with whomever, he deems fit. In other words, we don’t know precisely what the optimal form of growth for New York can be. That’s why we have to clear the field and let those entrepreneurs show us.

Yet both New York’s senior and junior senators seem to have missed out on this bit of knowledge. How else to explain Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton’s decision to vote “no” on fast track legislation when it finally made its way to the floor of the Senate? The Trade Promotion authority, or “fast track” power, that President Bush seeks would facilitate opportunity, by making it easier for the president to get future trade-liberalizing legislation through Congress.

Sure, as our man Starks in Washington reports on page one, both senators have offered reasons for their rejection. Senator Schumer doesn’t think the environmental protections sufficient. Mrs. Clinton is concerned about workers. To call their view myopic would be polite. You have to wonder what a pro-trade guy sitting in a Harlem office thinks of all this. After all, President Clinton, on his watch, called opposition to fast track an “America last strategy.”

New York, as if it needs recalling, is no longer a garment manufacturer or a heavy industry city, the sort that might even claim that it could protect its old-fashioned industries through restrictions. The city’s most promising sector for job growth and long-term economic expansion is Silicon Alley, which is heavily dependent on the ability to buy and sell goods across the globe. The finance sector and all of us as consumers also benefit from freer trade.

Yet both senators, and, sad to note, all but one of 14 city Congressmen opposed fast track. Instead our Senate delegation spent its winter and a good part of the spring wheedling consolation cash from the feds to compensate for September 11. The billions they won will — at the very most — help make New York into a nice museum for a sort of bygone city, the one that existed before September 11, and the one, decades before, that relied heavily on the work of trade unions to manufacture old-fashioned goods to sell to the world.

But this is a sort of Triangle Shirtwaist nostalgia. If New York is to be more than a museum — if it is to become the sort of dynamic city it can be — it has to find opportunity. Both the fast-track trade variety, and, as we’ve written, the fiscal sort, through lower taxes. More about this chance we don’t know. But we do know that if our Washington delegation continues its anti-growth path, we may never get it.