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Superman
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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You lost me at Bruce Wayne saying that the city should spend more on infrastructure.
This is ultra-Libertarian playboy Bruce Wayne who attends lavish rich guy parties in a city that's crumbling all around him. He could do so much to solve Gotham's problems by just paying higher taxes, but instead he spends his money coming up with cool gadgets he can use to beat up people who escaped from underfunded insane asylums.
Several comic lines have explored this issue. It's always come down to the fact that there are people just as rich as Wayne who are corrupt and bankrolling mob families, drug traffic, providing weapons, lobbying government, etc. Essentially it is one billionaire against a dozen billionaires. So, he still has to don the bat suit to do illegally the shit he can't do legally. Often he ends up using intel gathered as the bat for rich-people power plays to oust other corrupt rich people.
I think it's poignant of real life. If you want to stay rich, you don't fuck with the other rich people, because they will disappear you faster than you can blink. Being rich is a club that you are only part of until you start fucking with other people's wealth. If you are an ostracized solitary sod, who doesn't go to any social event and all you political stances are openly hostile against the entire rich class you are a part of, you won't stay rich for long and all the power that comes from that wealth will disappear, if you get to keep your life at all. Without all his money, Batman is just a really buff dude who is very smart and knows martial arts. I've met a few of those. Almost all of them broke as fuck.
One billionaire with all the high-tech toys in the world. He could easily bug all these billionaires and expose them. It seems to me that if he wanted real lasting change, they'd be his primary targets. Sure, occasionally there's a storyline like that, but it's rare.
Which is one of the most corrupt points of view you can have. Is staying rich so important to Batman that he'll turn a blind eye to the misdeeds of the other rich people?
It's basically the corrupt effective altruist playbook. Sure, I could help with these issues, but I can most effectively fix the world if I'm ultra rich, so my focus is going to be becoming / staying ultra rich, then I'll do a bit of charity on the side.
is this a specific comic storyline? because i read he spends most of his money on all sorts of programs and infrastructure and help, but gotham is cursed by a demon so it never improves
It's not a specific storyline, it's just the status quo in the Bat Universe.
Maybe he donates to various worthy causes here or there, but it doesn't seem to be a big enough donation to affect his rich playboy lifestyle at all, nor does it affect his budget for gadgets. What he never does is campaign for a major tax increase for billionaires. He's never meeting with the "Bernie Sanders" equivalent in Gotham, trying to push through progressive legislation.
The thing is, his character has the perfect excuse. He's really Batman, and Bruce Wayne is just a cover identity. But, to keep up appearances, he has to put on his tux and go to ultra-rich person parties as Bruce Wayne. It would seem suspicious and draw unwanted attention if his cover identity Bruce Wayne started lobbying for higher taxes on the rich, so he gets to use that as an excuse for why that filthy playboy Bruce Wayne never does those things. It's so that Batman can keep going out there and "fighting crime". AFAIK he's never outright said that that's his excuse for not lobbying for progressive causes. But, he has definitely said that he goes to ultra-rich person functions as Bruce Wayne and plays the idle rich guy because he needs to keep his cover story intact. It's mighty convenient, if you ask me.
Bro, I fucking hate Batman and think he's the worst comic book character of all time but when it comes to his philanthropy, you're just wrong.
Bruce Wayne spends an absurd amount of money keeping Gotham running. He's the one who actively funds all of the programs that are for orphanages, he hires thugs to keep them out of crime and he has a metric fuckload of low income programs.
Bruce Wayne CONSTANTLY lobbies for progressive causes. Straight up. He's aggressively leftist. The Wayne Foundation funds all manners of charities, medical research, and all kinds of stuff to fix the buildings he admittedly destroys. He will pay for college tuition for his employees and he will set up entire youth centers. The man perpetually puts all of his money back into Gotham.
If you want an example of this, issue #32 of Gotham Knights does a lot to focus on that. The entirety of that issue, and a lot of that series, is just Bruce Wayne living his normal life and the whole life is just philanthropy. He ends up supporting environmental policies, takes old people out to lunch, tells a mailroom employee to go to college and pays for his tuition. He goes off to a dedication ceremony for a statue and then goes golfing with a rich fuck and convinces her to build a recreation center instead of a Starbucks. Even shows an ex-con applying to a new job, and Wayne sending a ton of new bulletproof vests to Bludhaven PD.
Gotham itself literally would not exist without Wayne as it currently stands. It is a cesspit? Yes. But it would be worse without Wayne by a significant margin. Why? Because, and I feel like this isn't mentioned nearly often enough, Gotham is cursed to be this way. Like straight up literally cursed. You've got a bat-demon who's locked in the center of Gotham, that the city was built around an asylum that was created by a serial killer, and that Arkham Asylum has a literal portal to hell inside of it.
Bruce Wayne is another side of Batman. As in Bruce's own words: "As Bruce Wayne, I can utilize every division at Wayne Enterprises and the money we possess to improve the social and urban infrastructures in Gotham. And as The Batman, I can help the Gotham City police take on the criminals who prey on our city."
Saying that Bruce isn't a leftist and doesn't push for social change could not be further from the truth. He's a playboy, 100%, but he's a playboy philanthropist through and through. And I say all of this as someone who up until a few months ago thought the same thing. Still hate him for all those other reasons but that one had to be dropped when I realized it wasn't true. Dude is a genuine force for good in the world when it comes to his money. He got all of it from inheritance and the only things he does with it publicly is invest in Gotham and the world as a whole and be a rampant slut. Privately... yeah he's using a whole lot of toys.
"Leftists" are socialists. The "left" is a relative term.
Liberals aren't leftists. They're the left (in most places that speak English). There's a difference.
Wayne Corp's profits, built by exploiting their workers, being used for the public good as defined by its owner is liberalism at its ideal, not socialism.
Is there any hint that the amount he spends is having any meaningful impact on his wealth?
If he's a billionaire and his wealth goes up by $100m/year but he only spends $50m on charity, his charity is nowhere near enough.
If that were true he wouldn't be rich.
You say that as if it's a good thing. Unless that philanthropy is actively making him poor, it's just something he does to make himself feel good.
And then he goes back to his mansion where his butler helps him get ready for bed.
His money is the source of the problem, and he never seems to get any poorer. Is he cursed to be rich? Or is he telling the "effective altruist" lie that he can only continue to good things if he's insanely rich?
First off, having that much money in and of itself is going to generate fuckloads of money. He is also the CEO of one of the largest companies on Earth in his world. There are no numbers on the amount of income he has or the amount that he donates, just stupidly high numbers constantly thrown on either side. Like in the billions or trillions.
You know exactly what I meant and that is just being absurdly pedantic.
I am utterly incapable of seeing how someone helping others to make themselves better is actually a bad thing overall.
And?
His money? HIS money? No. Money. You seem to be conflating the two and getting weirdly angry over the wrong dude.
No but he is cursed to be intelligent and realize that he can do more good with his absurd riches than he can without it. His character builds Orphanages and community centers because he is rich. If he was broke he'd help in that way. But he's not. Because he's rich. He's just taking advantage of a world that's fucked and using the fucked things for good. He was born rich and knows how to be rich. He also wants to use that rich for good. By being rich, he just becomes more rich because that is how the world works. Unless you give away literally every dollar, you're going to make money just by being rich. It's stupid but that's how it works.
The problem isn't Bruce Wayne, the problem is the system. The dude cannot fix the system by snapping his fingers because he is dude. There are other rich people in this world who want to keep things the status quo. Batman has openly said on multiple occasions that he doesn't want to be rich and have this type of inequality but what's the other option? Seriously. I want you to actually name me a legitimate option of what he could do and then I will demonstrate when that happened in the comics or when it was pointed out in the comics that it cannot happened.
How? Money doesn't magically just appear. That money comes from somewhere. Every dollar Wayne receives is profit, profit that could go instead to lowering costs for Wayne Enterprises customers. Given that Wayne Enterprises is a huge conglomerate that seems to have its fingers in everything, he's probably literally taking money from the pockets of Gotham residents and putting it into his own bank account.
Because he's doing small individual things for individual people when he's simultaneously making the world a worse place by vacuuming up absurd amounts of profit from all the Wayne Enterprises customers.
It's like a chemical company that's poisoning a river, sickening millions, while simultaneously offering a scholarship to one kid, and getting all the good press that scholarship can offer.
Yes, individual orphanages, costing what, a few million to build? Meanwhile, Wayne Enterprises is generating massive profits that bring in billions of dollars. His vast enterprise is probably creating the orphans in the first place.
He's certainly taking advantage of the world, and yeah, he does some individual small-scale good, but it doesn't outweigh the large scale evil that Wayne Enterprises does.
It doesn't just work like that. Getting richer is a decision. Instead of taking massive profits from his worldwide enterprises, he could reduce prices and run his companies at break even. But, he prefers to get insanely rich off the backs of all the Wayne Enterprises customers.
No it isn't, getting rich is a decision. Especially true when you're the poweful head of a company where it would be the simplest possible thing to just lower prices.
And Wayne loves the system because it allows him to get fabulously wealthy while pretending that he's doing good.
Gee, if only there were a way to not be rich. I guess a genius like Bruce Wayne can't figure out how to not be rich, so it's not possible, so he's cursed to just be fabulously rich.
Basically, the only reason he's rich is that he chooses to have Wayne Enterprises make a profit. There are a lot of ways that he could either choose to not have Wayne Enterprises make a profit, or could choose to give away all his Wayne Enterprises stock.
You know, I've spent a good chunk of my morning dumpster diving for food. I don't have the energy for any of this but I still did it anyway because why not have a discussion. I'm not some rich simp, I absolutely hate them considering I have to dig through the trash to find something to eat today. Hopefully. But seeing you just straight up ignore giant chunks of my comment because you either cannot explain it away or just because it challenges your narrative makes me walking away from this comment and going to take a nap a whole lot easier.
Have a good day.
Yep, bail out of a discussion when your points are being wrecked and blame it on the other person. Stay classy.
Yep. Points being wrecked. Uh huh.
Alright. I'm out. Have fun, Republican.
Hahaha, ok. You're the guy defending the billionare, but I'm the Republican. Good one.
are you like one of batman's new villains this whole thread is absurd 😂
It's impossible for me to see him as anything other than the sole villain in the series
metro man is objectively a better person than superman