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