No doubt

"Gotham is so corrupt all the money would be wasted."

That's fine. Wealth inequality on that scale is evil and corrosive to society. It would be better to do something productive with it, but setting the money on fire would still be better than letting billionaires like Wayne hoard it.

The joker was totally based with his cash pyre in Dark Knight.

‘Wayne foundation’

…

It doesn’t look like a lot of people even read the comic books before forming these opinions about his storyline.

Gotham city has a prison that is corrupt like hell. The joker stays in it just for fun. He seems to be able to leave at any time.

Next Gotham city has a crime spawner. For no reason at all crimes seem to happen.

Badman should first fight the corrupt officials and raise a new administration for the city before he fights the low criminals.

I should stop coming to these threads. At the end of the day, Batman is rich by day and personally fights crime at night. Everything else is just added on to make that premise work. It feels like a bit of a Thermian argument ("she's naked because she breathes through her skin")

Edit: there's also something interesting to say about why "comic book" means "superheroes" in the US but "Donald Duck/Tintin/Astérix" in Western Europe

True. That is indeed very interesting. Although not limited to comic books. You can spot a similar pattern in movies too. Somehow, in America, the films to become the most popular (or most successful) mostly featured themes portraying powerful people in a positive light, directly or indirectly. While in Europe this trend never really took root.
In a classic, underdeveloped autocracy, the answer would surely be blatant censorship and prosecution of authors portraying different views. However, the American mechanisms for accomplishing the same goals are considerably more complex and intricate. That is, assuming there was or still is such a mechanism, as I'm not sure we can say that definitely. Perhaps it was all just a natural process of people preferring the easier, more convenient narratives?
- It's the neoliberal tale of individual responsibility. It translate too well into power worship.

I haven't even read Batman, but I've seen this same thread pop up enough times to know that:

Gotham is literally cursed
Gotham is extremely corrupt. Tax money wouldn't go where it needs to
Bruce Wayne bankrolls tons of social programs

It's cursed because comic writers couldn't come up with a better way to explain why the city can't be fixed by the world's smartest billionaire.
- The city can't be fixed because then there wouldn't be any more stories for them to write.
This ^^

Men will LITERALLY construct an entire persona based around their phobias as a result of trauma over witnessing the murder of their parents during a mugging orchestrated by crime bosses and spend millions of dollars on toys and gadgets to act out revenge fantasies and calling it vigilante justice rather than go to therapy.

God forbid a man has hobbies
Doesn’t he do both?
- Bruce Wayne goes to therapy, not Batman, it's different (canonically).
- I remember in some of the animated series that he would go to therapy but was not open and putting up his playboy billionaire persona. Honestly it seemed like a waste of a time for him if he wasn't being honest, unless it was to keep up appearances. Closest I think he gets to actual therapy is talking to Alfred.

This thread is full of people who have never read Batman comics.

Gothman is literally cursed from head to toe to be the way it is.

Batman is effectively sisyphus in that regard.

Gothman has syphillis?
- Lmao, im gonna leave it.
  Gothman is a meme in my friend group. He is effectively sad batman, a regular goth guy, and a visigoth all at the same time or which he ever needs to be at the time.
  He may not be the meme we deserve, but he is the one that we need to burn Rome.
Not only that, most fully realized versions of the character channel both the vigilante AND playboy personas to fight crime, using Wayne Enterprises to create welfare programs and jobs so Gothamites need not resort to crime to put food on the table.
There’s a scene where Batman pacifies a room of Black Mask goons without lifting a FINGER - he hacks the projector screen simply shows them a Wayne Foundation advertisement for better, safer jobs. One by one, every man simply drops their weapons and walks out the door as their crime boss irately yells at them to come back.
That's worse. You see how that's worse, right?
The entire premise of this accursed property is "structural change is definitionally impossible and evil-natured people cannot be helped so let's see how Batman brutally maims victims of this system to defeat the villain-of-the-day". This is such a profoundly repulsive ideology to me. It's not about the in-universe justifications, it's about the horrible, awful, despicable themes of the stories that glorify hyper-individualism and completely discredit democracy, civic institutions, and community.
The in-universe explanations were just tacked on to those core reactionary ideals. The writers didn't stumble on a cursed city, they invented a cursed city to justify their need for vigilantism and violence to be the only rational answers to society's ills.
Gothman is literally cursed from head to toe to be the way it is.
It's more like, this post is full of people describing why the only way the storyline can stay realistic is by introducing supernatural evil.
If it were not a cursed city and if Batman was really a hero who wanted to help people, he would do the social programs and investment in community, but that would be a pretty lousy monthly comic book for kids to read and buy batman merchandise.
- He already does all that on top of being batman.
- He does do those though?
- There are better places for superheroes. As I note above, there's a lot of elite deviance / white collar crime that Batman's amazing detective powers could easily be turned on. Heck, the US has been occupied and is controlled by a dangerous religious cult with a rogues gallery of masterminds vying for power, and they're behaving conspicuously like comic-book villains.
  On the street level, a mega-corporation fighting a labor organization for control over the workforce would be a great venue for vigilantes with extraordinary powers. Eventually they'd higher a PMC task force (possibly with a cadre of G. I. Joe like specialists) as the Guy of Gisbourne to our protagonists' Merry Men.
  There are a lot of directions that can be taken that pit vigilante justice-seekers against sociopolitical bullies with wealth and power. DC needs to just do a bit of brainstorming, but no they'd rather Batman fight the Joker for One More Time. 🥱
- Supernatural evil is not realistic. And when we encounter unearthly natural evils (which we do!), they tend to have solutions that are not a flying vigilante putting out street-crime level fires.
  Deep geological repositories for storing vitrified nuclear waste, for instance. We have those.

isn't a big part of the whole setup that this would not help much? like Gotham is just too corrupt, whenever programs are set up to invest in the public, they're mostly just stolen from.

Wayne is a philanthropist who gives a ton of money back through his own programs, right? presumably better overseen than the government ones.

I don't know how much money of Wayne's is actually used for philanthropy, but he can't just give the city all his wealth because it's too corrupt for it to be used well, right?

whenever programs are set up to invest in the public, they’re mostly just stolen from.
I'm reminded of the time Walgreens reported they were raising prices and closing stores because of rampant crime, but later admitted they made it the fuck up.
Where does Wayne's money come from?
How many hours does Wayne's day have that he can do millions or billions of dollars worth of actual work while still playing dress-up at night?
Or does his money come from short-changing and underpaying his employees, while hiking the prices for his customers? Or does it come from using speculation and investment to make sure he gets rich off other people being underpaid and overcharged?
How can he be a philanthropist when all his money comes from fleecing other people?
- Wayne Enterprises is essentially Lockheed-Martin, so yes, short changing his customers (that is, the US Government) figures largely into his business model. So does promoting military adventurism and forever wars.
  And that also means assuring that kids in the slums don't have access to opportunities other than the military.
presumably better overseen than the government ones
That's a particularly post-Reagan presumption, and is the product of the kind of deregulation that the Reagan administration spearheaded. In fact, government programs are especially good at fulfilling their roles, since the Pournelle motivation of survival of the department is actually a weaker diversion than the motivation of profit.
We've seen plenty of examples, how California regions that had public power fared better during the Enron crisis in the aughts or how Medicare was stronger and yielded a higher rate of positive outcomes before it was privatized by the George W. Bush administration. A similar thing happened in UK in which the NHS got privatized and reshaped for efficiency over redundancy, creating long lines and more poor outcomes.
Wayne has exactly the same kinds of right-wing biases that Andrew Carnegie did, and Bill Gates does, preferring to make decisions based on his own anecdotal experiences than based on data sets. Sure, he saved a kid from crime, and in the meantime more kids suffer from food precarity, from family precarity, from housing precarity than are getting pushed drugs and bullied by gangs. In fact, the gangsters are coming from the precarious environments of the first group.
Batman is ultimately a fantasy of personal responsibility, that we should each be strong enough to bootstrap our fortunes, even though actual data shows most don't, especially when there are extenuating factors like not being a non-disabled white dude with at least middle-class backing by family. Batman is glad to let everyone else that doesn't fit into that category suffer.
Granted DC can write what they want, which is why Batman can have a code vs. killing while still smashing the faces of half of Gotham. IRL bare-knuckle fisticuffs will actually kill, and Batman doesn't pull punches.
Rubber Bullets. Honest. -- Batman, The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, 1986
- Batman was created as the reverse of Superman: light vs darkness, superpowers vs a human being, just a journalist vs a billionaire, ...
  That's why were Superman is an ideal of everything that's good in humanity, Batman is the vision of the humanity not as a hero but as a vigilante.
it was like that since the O`Neil days if not earlier.
So why isn’t Batman beating up corrupt politicians and judges instead of crippling poor people who have no other opportunity to make money than to work for a villain?

Gotham is extremely corrupt, from the police departments being riddled with officers on any of the several mob payrolls. Same for the politicians. Feeding more tax dollars into that won't mean that money is going to the poor people who would benefit from it

Weirdly, when I watched the first season of Gotham, the GCPD was pronouncedly less corrupt than your typical municipal police department in the United States. The difference is GCPD was on the take by the Falcione family, but IRL police departments are the crime syndicate, themselves.
(This is a product partially of too much fighting with the Prohibition-era mob syndicates through the later 20th century until RICO laws were established, but now the mafia families are vastly reduced in power, the police unions took over. It's why we shrug off four-to-five officer-involved killings of innocent civilians every day, most of whom are unarmed and not resisting when the officer decides to escalate to unaliving them.)
At that point I realized even Gotham is copaganda, and the Batman/DC Cinematic Universe has little to do with what IRL looks like. Which is a shame, because DC could do better.
Gotham being corrupt should make it even easier for a billionaire like Wayne to control things, because as we see in real life, it doesn't take all that much money to influence politicians. There's nothing stopping Wayne from bribing the shit out of everyone to do non-evil things, then once Gotham is in a more stable place, bankroll campaigns for politicians that aren't corrupt. He could literally drain the swamp by backfilling it with money, but instead he decides to run around at night in his little gimp suit punching poor people
- Part of the point of so many of Batman's villains is that, to quote joker, it's not about the money but about sending a message. Or holding power in many cases. Many of the most corrupt villains are not only bankrolling bribes, they are also blackmailing tons of people and many more live under threat to loved ones. Wayne just waltzing in and saying "I'll pay you triple to be good" does nothing. Because if they don't do the villain's biding they will get murdered and their family will be slaughtered. Hence the need for a vigilante to disrupt the corrupt system with direct action. That's the whole arc of Harvey Dent, for example. The system took him down in the worst possible way to shape him into another morally bankrupt psycho.
Isn’t that a massive indictment of Batman’s entire modus operandi though? That there can be a terrifying lunatic who will beat you up with his little finger if you even think of doing a crime, and yet crime and corruption is worse than in every other city?
I do think there's some merit to paying those kids of people enough via the state that they're less likely to need or want to be corrupt in order to make ends meet.
Of course there are people who would still use that to live their life in luxury at the expense of others but I believe that'd generally be a minority

Gotham is so corrupt that it would make Russia blush. If you taxed Bruce Wayne at 99%, nothing would change except the cops would all suspiciously have new supercars.

Well. Part of batman mythos is that no amount of money is enough to save the city from itself.

I don't think this person ever read batman.

This person is arguing for higher taxation of the wealthy in the real world, not necessarily engaging in detailed analysis of the fictional world of Batman
- I would be surprised if they did any more studying of real government systems and economies than they did of the batman lore.
  So many people going around the internet just spouting whatever superficial shit they heard in their group.
- And yet here we are.

Tax wealth not work

Oh you're saying we should tax wealth, and we should not tax work.
For a second I thought you were saying "taxing wealth does not work" like a tribal. Few word sometimes do trick.
- Tarzan ass tax policy lmao
  "Flat tax good, all pay same share"
  (Flat tax not good, hurt poor more)
- Tax income no work
  Wealthy still get more wealth
  No wealthy get even less wealth
  Must tax wealthy not no wealthy

We are assuming that somehow if Wayn pays large sums of wealth to the government, the government wouldn't just be their usual wasteful, corrupt, self serving self with said money. You get every current billionaire in the USA to pay a fair tax. Where do you think the money goes? Funding for food stamps or Lockeed-Martin?

Also in the DC universe, the equivalent of Lockeed-Martin is Wayne Enterprises. There's stories where Bruce is conflicted in making weapons, but nonetheless, his fortune is built on the military industrial complex.
- So Bruce Wayne is somehow worse than freaking Tony Stark?
  Then again Stark is an inventor and comics-level genius who lacks a secret identity, so pivoting to another industry was way easier for him. Bruce Wayne probably can't change his company too much without losing a ton of pull and drawing unwanted attention to himself, plus losing access to the gadgets he relies on.
Underfunding the government through tax cuts makes corruption more likely. The richer the rich are, the easier it is to manipulate the government for them. Why do you think so much money goes to Lockheed Martin? Who gets government contracts isn’t chosen at random, there are moneyed interests involved.
If the income tax graduations are steep enough then the billionaire class will optimize to minimize taxes by reducing their own income in favor of reinvesting in their business and employees. In theory. In reality I'm sure they'd find some way to squirrel it away while their employees apply for and get denied food stamps.
I think pretty much every study even made has shown taxing the rich and investing in the public reduce crime rates and poverty. It's the reason the USA had a massive middle class before Reagan and has experienced massive wealth disparity today: differences in tax policy and public investment.
- Yes, but that's not really the point. The point is that "taxing the rich" and "investing in the public" aren't necessarily the same thing. Just cause the government is collecting money doesn't mean it's spending it responsibly. Especially in the (literally) comically-corrupt world of Gotham.
You're assuming we'd stop at Bruce Wayne.
The same people willing go after Batman are willing to go after Lockheed-Martin and every politician they paid for.

Im gonna say that this is why Batman Forever is my favorite Batman movie. There is this scene where the badguys rip a bank vault out of the wall, and by the end of the scene batman uses an explosive to have fly back into place. My point is, Batman needs to take place in a pulpy hyper reality, or he goes from a Doc Savage in a cool costume to a mentally insane Billionaire karate chopping poor people because as punishment.

Also, in that movie, they took pains to portray him as a "Good" ceo.

I just think this is an issue of tone and presentation.

Absolutely this. Ever since Nolan, we've been getting grimmer, darker, more "realistic" reboots of the character as directors try to figure out what Batman would look like in the real world. Burton and Schumacher asked the much funner question of, "What kind of crazy nonsense world worships a vigilante in a furry suit?"
that is why i love the gothic tone of Tim Burton, it is a Hallucinogenic reality with grotesque characters

What bugs me is this is a controversial opinion about Batman. That there's still objection to the notion that Batman is fulfilling his own violent jollies in the color of seeking justice, rather than using his massive fortunes to serve good.

I think my most controversial Batman opinion is that his code vs. killing is bunk. Even if he just punches goons, he does so enough that goons would die often enough to give Batman a substantial body count. I'm sure his press crew and legal team are occupied continuously with the task of cleaning up his messes.

In fact, there's not enough dramatic crime (like bank heists, contrast domestic violence or check-cashing fraud, which not even regular police care much about) to support a superhero career¹

Curiously, Batman could make a career going after elite deviance / white collar crime, going after the Sacklers for pushing opioids and starting the current opioid crisis, going after companies that lobby governments to deregulate so they can pollute or push false products (e.g. cars as opposed to public transit; ETA A new video popped up about the wellness industry that pushes mostly pure quackery, and has captured the HHS, so we're in a bit of a need of this kind of vig.); Or the DeVos family who use MLMs and PMCs to make their millions; Or the private equity companies like Bain Capital and Blackrock who get rich by creating massive bankruptcy sinkholes leveraging the brand reputations of aging companies and foreclosing commodities for their own personal gain. If Wayne wanted to go after the very sorts of things he, his company and his parents did / do to amass their fortunes, he could prevent a lot of cost, destruction and loss of life by orders of magnitude more than all the petty crime put together.

Funny DC doesn't want to do that, though. Maybe Detective Comics is just state and law enforcement propaganda and they like it that way.

( ¹ ) Batman is not just a mountain of a man and master martial artist, but also has the academic capacity of several doctorates, assuming he -- and not a secret task force of backup investigators -- does all his detective-work and implements all his backup plans. Personally, I like the idea of Batman as a sophisticated justice and detective agency.

It's a controversial opinion because it's ill-informed. Bruce Wayne does give the majority of his money to charity. Even Superman, the goodest person on earth, looks up to him. But no amount of funding food banks or building low-income housing is going to uncurse the cursed land that Gotham is built on
- Yeah I recall half the issue being that Gotham is so corrupt, any money is going to be wasted, which is why the Wayne family has to have its own charities to accomplish anythign at all.
- ill informed
  And this is where I ask if I even give you the time of day. I don't think you understand the failures of modern charity in contrast to, say, the general fund of an actually-democratic society.
  In fact, Oakland, California IRL is doing a lot of the things that Gotham should be doing including food banks and low-income housing projects, but also extending the list of 911 responders to provide alternatives to a police force that is eager to escalate to violence and can't handle mental health crises, kids programs, school breakfast and lunch programs. You know, the kinds of things that an actual society might do.
  Unless you're arguing there's a literal magical curse on the city of Gotham, in which case no amount of face-punching thugs is going to help either, and DC's writing is proving as consistent as ever.
  I posted below in more depth regarding the serious failure of the Batman paradigm, and would argue the fantasy is as much utopianism as Starship Troopers.
He could go after alpha agencies that are the biggest source of illicit dope, and also other kinds of trafficking.

Here is a short list of shit going on in Gotham at any given time, not including the wide array of psychopaths and supervillains doing shit at any given time:

The insane asylum with the portal to hell (Depending on if you consider Living Hell canon or not.)
The Lazarus pit in the city spewing chemicals into the water supply.
All the other chemicals likely in the water supply from a wide array of sources, including regular pollution and goofy shit.
The remnants of the evil warlock who was sealed under the city for centuries.
The massive mafia presence and general corruption.
The Illuminati that uses zombie soldiers.

That is not shit proper taxation is going to resolve. You can't protected bike lane away the zombie controlling Illuminati.

The Lazarus pit in the city spewing chemicals into the water supply.
All the other chemicals likely in the water supply from a wide array of sources, including regular pollution and goofy shit.
Fixing contaminants to the water supply is absolutely something proper taxes should be able to solve.
- Key word, Should. If taxes actually went where people say it does, it might. And even then, it'd also take a lot of funding outside of just taxes, not to mention someone to actually start doing stuff about with all that funding. Also note on that list is rampant corruption and criminal syndicates mingling with the government.
I mean two of those are pretty clearly regulation issues. Maybe if the city's Regulatory Agencies weren't so strapped for cash they'd be more able to address pollution and water safety issues. Also you can always build a new Asylum elsewhere but apparently they don't have the funds for that I guess? It's amazing have Bruce Wayne doesn't use his philanthropy to build one, almost like he likes them being crazy so he has someone to beat up.
- I mean two of those are pretty clearly regulation issues. Maybe if the city’s Regulatory Agencies weren’t so strapped for cash they’d be more able to address pollution and water safety issues.
  See point 5.
  It’s amazing have Bruce Wayne doesn’t use his philanthropy to build one, almost like he likes them being crazy so he has someone to beat up.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Enterprises#Wayne_Foundation
In that case, Dr. Strange or whoever should be sealing the hell-mouths. Batman face-punching the victims of all these effects is not helping.
I grew up during the smog-alert era of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, exerting myself, walking home uphill from school (yes, the had to walk in snow from school story except in my case, it was smog and it was true). No number of batmen or tough-on-crime judges were going to fix that, and heck even the limited smog regulations on cars we have today do enough. (Though switching to unleaded gasoline certainly helped generations after mine by lessening the damage). Only public transit and tighter regs on cars is going to help that.
Don't justify Batman's fists by saying there are extenuating pollution circumstances. The rogues gallery are the results of what comes down to poor urban planning and a superfluous layer of white-collar crime. If Batman was going after Pfizer and the Sacklers or Du Pont Chemical and PFOA manufacturers or all the private equity firms, then he'd be a hero. Otherwise, he's a crazy rich dude who beats up on poor people and has writers who won't think the problem through.
I think the US has just outgrown the Batman fantasy. I'd hope so, at least.
He could literally call up a couple folks he knows who have absurd, godly super powers to shut all of that down, or pick up the entire chunk of landmass those problems are stuck in and hurl them into the sun.
Meanwhile, setting up huge social programs to raise the quality of life for every Gotham resident which would decentivize crime and the wacky crime lords wearing funny outfits and other gimmicks would suddenly find the city less profitable and harder to hire thugs.
It would take a lot of time and resources, it would be challenging, but eventually it would make a difference enough to help the quality of life for millions of residents. More lives would be saved than a single incident involving a giant bomb being used to threaten a bank or some shit.
edit: wild how much more response and engagement you get when you attack fictional characters than when you talk about real problems.
- He could literally call up a couple folks he knows who have absurd, godly super powers to shut all of that down, or pick up the entire chunk of landmass those problems are stuck in and hurl them into the sun.
  May as well ask why Mr. Fantastic doesn't cure cancer, or other super geniuses don't ensure no one ever goes hungry again. We both know the answer: Because the comic would end. Thinking about this shit too hard causes it all to fall apart. The ol' Superman was a transitional energy source idea. Beyond that, if we're applying the lens of "Just tax him properly" we can't also apply the lens of "Just call Superman to eye laser the joker dummy." Gotta pick a lane here.
  Meanwhile, setting up huge social programs to raise the quality of life for every Gotham resident which would decentivize crime and the wacky crime lords wearing funny outfits and other gimmicks would suddenly find the city less profitable and harder to hire thugs.
  Wayne has. Foundations in both parents names. Hires ex-cons on the regular. Wacky super criminals aren't typically interested in profitability, Joker isn't looking to make millions and retire. He's criminally insane.
“Decent people shouldn’t live here. They’d be happier someplace else”

This lame-o argument again? If leftists spend as much time engaging in actual politics instead of smugposting online we would have a saner system.

I too expect to find legitimate political discourse on c/politicalmemes!
and what have you done besides complain about "libtards" dying their hair for the past 30 years?
- Please do not put words in my mouth

In the Batman Year 1 comic the thing that makes the police believe there really is a 'Bat-Man' is when he attacks a fancy dinner party and warns Gotham's movers and shakers that justice is coming for them, too.

Yeah, it's pretty clear Gotham was full of corruption from top to bottom, which pushed him into becoming Batman. Philanthropy would just fuel the corrupt politicians into funneling money to the crime bosses, and taking a cut. Probably if he started a soup kitchen and was on the ground getting people out of poverty, he would achieve improvement, but when the police, courts, and politicians are on the crime bosses payrolls, funding those institutions more will not solve Gotham's problems
- I vaguely remember some stories, he does do the whole non-profit thing, too. It's still a little bit too pro-billionaire but yeah, in their setting it's quite likely the government is too corrupt.
  Also he fucking funds other superheroes, so it's a little hard to say what actually works in that crazy universe. I can't imagine superheroing to be profitable.