
The Celebrity Solution - jlhamilton
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/magazine/09CELEBRITY-t.html?ex=1362718800&en=c084e2bf0f993ac4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
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mynameishere
_Celebrities, and especially Hollywood celebrities, have always engaged in
public philanthropy. In “An Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler describes
charity dinners of the 1930s where movie-industry moguls would gather at the
Hillcrest Country Club and outbid one another with gifts to the United Jewish
Welfare Fund and other Jewish causes._

Wow. The nytimes overtly claims that organizations devoted to advancing a
particular race counts as "public philanthropy". That's no surprise to those
of us who pay attention, but they usually don't make it so obvious.

As for charity, it is destructive of the human impulse for self-improvement
which, understood properly, is anybody's only hope. The same celebrities who
want to steal money from taxpayers in order to throw it away on Africa are the
ones who want to shut down third world shoe factories because the workers
don't get enough bathroom breaks.

Microfinance seems like a potential exception to that, but only to the extent
that it stops being modeled on charitable grounds.

