Byrne is not as optimistic as Friedman.

Patrick Byrne: I used to ask . . . I’ve asked Milton Freedman actually that same question, and he . . . he always said that I was lucky in that I was just a born optimist. No matter how bad things got; no matter how statist the intellectual class became in the ‘40s, and the ‘50s, and ‘60s, I was always an optimist. I always . . . I knew the books weren’t going to be burned. I thought that we would come out of it. I guess I’m not so . . . I don’t . . . I can’t be as optimistic as he was. I’ve become in the last two or three years, as I’ve discovered that the system is just turtles all the way down, I don’t think that we’re gonna be able . . . Well I think it’s a 50-50 thing whether we’re going to be able to fashion the responses that we need to deal with the largest problems we face.

Recorded on: 10/29/07