He needs to have some batmanning skills and equipment because the more he publicly supports improving things, the more often criminals who benefit from things being bad will attempt to assassinate Bruce Wayne. Gotham is full of graves of people who tried improving things legitimately.

Really, the best thing he could do with his money would be to hire and train a bunch of mini batmen to work as bodyguards for all the people who are trying to improve things. Lots of the aforementioned graves belong to people that he’d briefly left unattended while he had to do something else, and that wouldn’t be a problem if there was someone else available to cover for him.

He could’ve have used money to campaign for government reform

He did

maybe the city should rezone that part of town. or wall it off

It’s the whole city

Maybe he should open some mental health wards focusing on the mental health crisis going on in Gotham.

He did, I think he’s the primary funder of Arkham

I can see the argument for environmentalism with poison ivy, but who exactly is fighting for workers rights?

That also seems like an excuse to argue that Batman is somehow a bad guy in the situation, which is quite the stretch considering most, if not all, of the villains he faces would see gotham wiped out to see their goals acheived.

It also ignores that in his Bruce persona he does do a lot of charitable work (including environmentalism and worker protections). But, as you say, him sitting in board meetings organizing this stuff wouldnt make for very entertaining stories.

And i was never saying he was a role model, just that the constant mischaracterization is tiresome. Saying that just cause he was born to generational (and fictional) wealth he is automatically a bad guy. That clearly he could be doing better things (that he mostly does do anyway).

Is putting on an animal costume and risking his life to protect others the act of a stable person? Fuck no. But its not like its also inherently harmful either. Especially in the world created around him.

He literally canonically does all of that. Gotham isn’t real life, real life socioeconomics don’t apply.

He could donate money for the campaigns of good government officials.

Like Harvey Dent, who became Two-Face?

He could’ve opened a string a mental health facilities because Gotham has a major mental health problem.

Harley Quinn’s origin story is that she was Joker’s psychiatrist.

IMO: In the real world Joker and the rest of most heroes rogues galleries would have 100% been either sentenced to death (Which while it doesn’t currently exist in Gotham which is in New Jersey, would likely be put into effect considering waves hands broadly at the various levels of shit that has gone down in Gotham over the years.) or murdered by a cop who said they “lunged for his gun”. Superman would be a transitional energy source, we’d be living in luxury gay space communism owing to the innumerable genius level intellects (Atom, Mr. Terrific, Brainiac 5, Blue Beetle, the list goes on.) fixing basically every issue, which makes for a great reality but a really boring comic book universe.