It is difficult to pigeonhole Keynes as a socialist. On the one hand, he showed an interest in socialist regimes and advocated the presence of government in economic affairs. He emphatically did not believe in letting business cycles go through boom and bust without intervention—or in letting private enterprise operate unfettered. On the other hand, Keynes stopped short of advocating that governments actually take over and run industries. He wanted central authorities to stimulate, but not necessarily control, methods of production. There is also evidence that he was returning to more traditional free-market capitalism towards the end of his life, as he was considering ways to get post-war Britain out of an economic hole. Shortly before his death in 1946, he told his friend, Secretary of State Henry Clay, that he found himself relying more on a solution he had “tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago": Adam Smith’s invisible hand (the natural tendency of a free-market economy to self-correct via the laws of supply and demand).