So why are beatniks considered left wing?

I’ve long been a fan of William S. Burroughs, and it was nice to read a recent Reason piece about his view of the nanny state:

In July of 1957, an unknown writer named William Burroughs visited a friend in Copenhagen. After three weeks in the area, including a brief excursion to Sweden, he wrote to the poet Allen Ginsberg that “Scandinavia exceeds my most ghastly imaginations.” In Naked Lunch, the novel Burroughs was writing at the time, Scandinavia became a model for a place called Freeland. “Freeland was a welfare state,” the book explained. “If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion.”

He also complained to Kerouac and Ginsberg about the evils of socialism:

…Burroughs’ worldview was miles from the peace-and-love socialism that our cultural clichés tell us to expect from a hippie hero. In 1949, according to Barry Miles’ new biography Call Me Burroughs, he complained to Kerouac that “we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism.” When he was a landlord in New Orleans he sent Ginsberg a rant against rent control, and when he found himself owning a farm in Texas he gave Ginsberg an earful about the evils of the minimum wage. Eventually he departed for Mexico, and there he wrote to Ginsberg again. “I am not able to share your enthusiasm for the deplorable conditions which obtain in the U.S. at this time,” he told his leftist friend. “I think the U.S. is heading in the direction of a Socialistic police state similar to England, and not too different from Russia….At least Mexico is no obscenity ‘Welfare’ State, and the more I see of this country the better I like it. It is really possible to relax here where nobody tries to mind your business for you.”

I can’t begin to imagine what he would think if he could see the world today.

Kerouac is of course another major figure from the beat generation who never fit the leftie narrative.