system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Nolan's Dark Night series, Batman] Did Ras Al Ghul (or the people who wrote him) have a flawed philosophy surrounding crime?

Like, at the end of the first film, Ras says "create enough hunger, and everyone becomes a criminal," claiming they League of Shadows had used "economics" to crush Gotham -- Specifically, one of the people who were forced into crime by their economic actions (presumably somehow crushing Gotham's economy) ended up killing Bruce Wayne's parents.

I mean, he's admitting he understands that economic hardship leads to crime, but then saying the crime has to be purged? E.G., in the past hundred years political and economic theory has been written to explain that prostitutes or gangsters tend not to do those things because they're """bad"""" people, they're doing it because of economic hardship - Prostitutes, in particular, tend to be people kidnapped from their homeland and forced into it with violence and abuse.

So, why is the League of Shadows then not advocating to institute Nordic/European-style Social-Democratic policies or outright socialist/communists? They're admitting that they're causing crime and understand that.

So, with that understood, why purge Gotham anyway?
gpt
By the time Ra's al Ghul set his sights on Gotham City, it was already well beyond redemption; this is likely why he began operations there to begin with, as the League of Shadows had done in Constantinople and Rome in previous centuries.  Economics was something of an experiment for the League, less overt than the burning of London but with the same effect.  It ultimately boils down to believing that people need to be controlled and disciplined; left to their own devices, people will readily eat each other and plunge the civilized world into anarchy.  And nowhere is that more readily apparent than Gotham City.  The League of Shadows' MO seems to be akin to a societal euthanasia; better to end an irreparable condition quickly and humanely rather than let it fester and have the people suffer for generations to come.