Be of Good Cheer, Conservatives

2012 had more than its share of disappointments for conservatives. The twisted logic of the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision—a law forcing people to purchase health insurance isn't constitutional, so we'll make the it constitutional by calling it a tax—was unfathomable. The growth of food stamps and federal welfare payments (to $1.03 trillion annually) was staggering. The U.S.'s precipitous drop out of the top 10 in the world's Prosperity Index was disheartening. The reelection of a liberal-progressive president—whose policies had utterly failed the nation by every economic measure—was shocking.

The country has weathered dark liberal-progressive storms in the past, and it will again. As Amity Shlaes makes clear in her book, The Forgotten Man, Franklin D. Roosevelt (the current president's hero) prolonged the Great Depression in the U.S. long after other industrialized nations were back on their feet. He, too, waged class warfare, persecuted and vindictively taxed business people, regulated the private sector into paralysis, and showered political favors on groups and business cronies that cozied up to him. Many of FDR's failed economic policies left with him, however; and America's economy rebounded, enjoying more than a half-century of innovation, growth and prosperity. The FDR experience serves as a reminder that the present circumstances may be disheartening, but the future still holds promise.

One example of that promise is domestic energy. Today while the White House pursues the fool's gold of green energy policies, trillions of dollars of black gold sit waiting beneath America's feet and just off her shores. Try hard as he may, this president can neither un-invent the technology that is making America's black gold rush possible nor un-discover the vast fields of natural resources available to the nation. He can only succeed in delaying their full potential. (Read more about the amazing energy boom.)

So be of good cheer. America's natural and human resources are her strength, and they still offer a bright future.