California is Communist?! Don’t let the folks in Orange County (just south of Los Angeles County) hear you say that! It’s Republican/Reagan country, almost like Texas (aside from Austin, of course ;-). In Northern California, San Jose and Cupertino (where I grew up) to be exact, you have Apple and eBay, not exactly redistributing the wealth. The house directly across the street from my childhood home---a ranch-style 3-bedroom, 2-bath tract house---just sold for $1.4 million! Now, if you’re talking about San Francisco and Marin County (where the rich hippies, like The Dead, live) you may have a point.
The Hoffman site provides a lot of great musical information, but Steve himself has made claims for some of his work that is provably false. Claims about original tapes used as sources for some of his reissues, for instance. When you’re doing great work, why the need to inflate the claims?