While Keynesian economics was available from 1936 onward, the Depression of the 1930s was ended by pragmatic governmental intervention, as with New Deal employment-generating programs in the United States, and the militarization of all the Western economies involved in World War II. During the postwar period, Keynesian economics became the basis of growth theories promulgated by economists other than Keynes (who died in 1946), particularly in the design of policies that might maintain full employment. Full employment and a better life were promises that all political parties, Republican or Democratic, Conservative or Labor, were forced to make to millions of soldiers returning from a war that saved the West. The question “Whose society did we just risk our lives for?” was too close to the political surface for the previous political-economic platitudes to suffice. Particularly in western Europe, political attitudes turned toward socialism or, more accurately, in a social democratic direction. For example, the British working class ejected Winston Churchill, Conservative party hero of the war, to elect a Labor government committed to full employment, heavily subsidized state-run social services (such as the National Health Service), educational reform (scholarships for university students), and significant income redistribution achieved by taxing the rich and paying the poor (family allowances, etc.). Also, in many countries outside the United States, under social democracy the state directed what remained a basically capitalist economy with key industrial sectors (transportation, mines, steel, chemicals) nationalized—that is, owned and run by state corporations. This (Fabian) socialist version of social democratic politics merged with leftist theoretical interpretations of Keynes to produce a political economics that favored the working class. This was not merely because workers spent any income redistributed to them and therefore kept the economy going in a Keynesian sense. It was also because they deserved higher incomes and free social services, for in the socialist view the people, as workers, are the producers of value and income, while labor creates growth. Most of this view came, for a while, to be taken for granted by popular opinion in the western European countries and the “working-class paradises” of Australia and New Zealand. In Britain, the Beveridge Report of 1942 resulted in a comprehensive system of social security and a National Health Service that provided free health care after the end of World War II. The report was based on the principle of banishing poverty, declaring: “A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching” and “The organisation of social insurance should be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress” (Beveridge 1942). By comparison, the United States was never fully social democratic. U.S. social legislation, such as the Employment Act of 1946, was far more limited than its European equivalent. When the United States took over the role of guardian of the West from Britain, the resulting political economy is best described as military Keynesianism—that is, the maintenance of high growth rates through “defense” spending by the state (Turgeon 1996)—rather than social Keynesianism, that is, the maintenance of high employment rates through state planning and social progress.