You are Bruce Wayne.

[Tailsteak]

You are Bruce Wayne, billionaire industrialist.

You own 51% of Wayne Industries, a large multinational corporation that employs thousands and produces nearly every good and/or service a human being could desire. Thanks to some truly brilliant delegating, you spend only a few hours a week running this gigantic corporate behemoth, and pull in a yearly salary of around $10 million. If you chose to embezzle or start liquidating things, you could, conceivably, get your hands on around $100 billion before Wayne Industries completely fell apart.

You live in Gotham, a city of roughly the same size and population of New York City. Gotham is plagued by crime, both of the typical sort - muggings, narcotics and weapon trades, domestic disputes - and over-the-top supervillain crimes, usually perpetrated by persons with catastrophic mental disorders. The police of Gotham are swamped, and you suspect many are corrupt. When the criminally insane are captured, they are invariably sent to a nearby mental institution, and few stay longer than a couple of months (they either escape or are mistakenly diagnosed as cured).

Given these parameters, how do you choose to spend your ample supply of money and time? What would be the ethically or morally correct course of action? Can you make the case for Batman being that correct course of action? If not, what is?

[Alex Starkiller]

I've got a bit of a hero complex so I'm biased. Though I would certainly do my best to help the police, specifically Gordon as he's a known quantity, I doubt that would be enough for anything above thug level crime. I cannot really find any reason to object ethically or morally to being Batman, so that's all there is to my thoughts.

[Merle]

1) I'd go the Bill Gates route, setting up funds and various projects to help out the city. Education and decent living conditions should eliminate a fair chunk of the crime.

2) Set up an organization to lobby heavily for prison reform, both to rehabilitate normal criminals and to improve holding conditions and treatment for supervillains.

3) I can't really justify being Batman when my death would probably cripple my efforts in parts (1) and (2), but I'd definitely want to set up the cops in Gotham with whatever snazzy technologies my labs could come up with. If I really am Bruce Wayne, with the insanity that entails, I'd probably use vigilante shenanigans as a testing bed for new tech that I can pass on to Gotham's police force once the kinks are worked out.

[snowyowl]

The Batman routine can be improved on.

Find (somehow, I'll skip the logistics) a dozen people you can trust, who are young, physically fit, and not afraid of getting their hands dirty. (You'll pay them, of course.) Put them through a crack course in tactics, armed combat, unarmed combat, parkour, and psychological warfare. Then, give them all identical Batman suits, and ensure that they are never seen together in uniform. Issue them with gadgets as needed.

Now, convince the cowardly and superstitious criminals that Batman is a single man who is always watching what they're doing. If done right, Batman will appear to be a superbeing who can fight more crime in one night than any human. This is the same trick as the comic's Batman pulled, but amplified.

In the event that you need two Batmans for one operation, you can have a "Robin" costume as well so that they can be seen together. If more than two, dress up the rest in pseudo-military uniforms.

Still not ideal, but a marked improvement on a single (human, fallible) Batman.

The actually ideal route is probably something boring like running for office and giving extra funding to the police and education.

[MysticWav]

Well, let's be honest now. You need Batman because of the supervillains. The cops aren't going to stop those and the 10 mill per year in cop upgrades is not going to make the difference, especially since they are a comrpomised force in your mind. Now, I do think there is room for two investments in the Batman budget that would make a difference.

1) Carve out money for Arkham security upgrades. As a one time expense this is the sort of thing that would reap a lot of dividends. Even if it's just a set of sensors that will automatically alert /me/ (batman) so I can proactively run them down before they can go about reestablishing their arsenals and followings. Hell, maybe even put some sort of sublte tracking implant in them unbeknownst to them after I've beaten them unconcious in our last fight.

2) Work on establish a crowd-sourced or clandestine surveillance state in Gotham City. Either buy everyone google glass style as part of a Bruce Wayne initiative so we can rapidly track and prosecute criminals with video evidence of just someone witnessing it. Or if I think that such glass wearing will result in the citizens being targeted for reprisal, I can set up hidden bat-cameras and sound triangulation microphones around the city. Set up my personal supercomputer to track these and forward the anonymous tips to both cops and reporters for the mundane stuff they can handle, and also for my own use on the stuff they can't.

[Horizon]

As a silly answer:
Fact 1) Wayne Industries produces high explosives
Fact 2) Gotham is weak to large amounts of high explosives
Fact 3) If nobody lives in Gotham, there will be no crime
Conclusion: Blow up Gotham.
As a serious answer:
Move to somewhere less bad.
As a seriously silly answer:
Raise an army, conquer Gotham, declare independence and martial law until crime gets better. Clean out the police force, make several surprise inspections, in general clean things up with industrial strength cleaners.

[RyukaTana]

Hypotheticals often don't have all the necessary information. So, let me touch on a few scenarios.

If I am Bruce Wayne, then yes, I become Batman, I have the dedication and the haunted past. That's what Bruce Wayne did, so that's what I'd do if I was him. Yup, that's a dick answer, but just saying, if I'm him I'd do what he did...

Now, first, let's ask the question: 'Do the Arkham-style villains happen pre-Batman or post-Batman?' In most cases, the latter, I doubt that's entirely coincidental, but to be fair, it's hard to argue for how Batman exactly inspired some of his villains. For instance Victor (Mr. Freeze) or Pamela (Poison Ivy) in many cases stumbled into their villainy. They became villains of circumstance. Though, I guess a lot of villains are tied to how some supervillain or Batman fucked up their lives... Anyway, there's something to be said for whether Batman made most of his rogue's gallery by being Batman, or if they would have happened anyway.

In the end, though, if I'm Bruce Wayne in position, maybe name, only, then I'm not going to become Batman. I don't think I have any more of a moral or ethical obligation than I think Donald Trump has to go fight crime. I do, however, believe I need to do something with my money, but it would be the socially acceptable 'help out inner city kids' and 'beef up the cops with funding' type bullshit. I don't know what I'd do... If possible, I might turn criminals against each other. I wonder if I could hire Slade to murder the fuck out of Scarface and the Joker...

Anyway, barring that, I'd probably retire someplace safe with a small community of people I love and trust. Maybe build a commune but minus all that hippie shit. If I can't better the world, I can at least create a small section of truly happy and loving people. Also, I'd have a car that shoots missiles, because why wouldn't you...

Find (somehow, I'll skip the logistics) a dozen people you can trust, who are young, physically fit, and not afraid of getting their hands dirty.

<Snip>

Still not ideal, but a marked improvement on a single (human, fallible) Batman.

Now you have 12 heavily armed, highly dangerous vigilantes. I gotta say, 'skip the logistics' skips the most important part. Even Jesus couldn't find 12 dudes he could trust implicitly, and they weren't deadly mercenaries...

<General stuff Horizon said about silly ideas...>

Actually, Horizon, while those ideas are silly, it does get me thinking. Joker's entire schtick in 'The Dark Knight' for about half the movie was getting into the villains and manipulating them to do as he wanted and fuck with them. He didn't even have Bruce Wayne's insane resources... Maybe there's something to the idea of becoming the guy who waits until just the right time to twist everyone around my finger, and then burn them all from within...

[Horizon]

Which idea inspired it? My plan out of a Final Fantasy game? My plan out of a Discworld book featuring Rincewind? Or my plan out of... where was the last one from? Or did I have an original idea?
EDIT: Also, does Superman exist in this hypothetical universe? Or any other DC Comics hero?

[RyukaTana]

I read your first plan as Batman stealing Bane's plan from 'The Dark Knight Rises'. Which made me think about Batman stealing the plans of one of is antagonists, and the Joker fucked up about as many criminals as Batman in 'The Dark Knight'.

[Horizon]

No, the first one is the plot of every final fantasy game bar three*. The villain is so fucked in the head, their frontal lobe is a penis, and they think, 'Life sucks. We all agree on that. So, to fix this, I'll end all life. This all makes sense. Now, where are those arsenic/lead paint chips, I'm hungry.', and go through with killing everyone, after their snack and washing it down with a glass of mercury. But then heroes happen, and villain is dead.


*Final Fantasy 1: Garland wanted to live forever, and messed with time to do so.
Final Fantasy 6: Kefka was insane, and wanted to watch the world burn. He wasn't trying to end suffering, he was trying to create it.
Final Fantasy 7: Sephiroth planned to kill God and usurp his throne.