More Words, Deeper Hole

The thing about classic Superman, though, is that his powers operate on such a scale that he's really wasting them on law enforcement. He should be dealing with natural disasters, including helping with search & rescue after the fact, building or repairing necessary infrastructure, stuff like digging wells in areas without running water, de-land-mining mined areas, saving sinking ships & crashing planes, etc. Surely there's enough floods and fires in the world to keep him pretty busy; it's a frivolous use of his time to deal with purse snatchers. From that perspective, preventing him from operating in the world to help people can really only be a sociopathic choice (as indeed in "Man of Steel" when Pa Kent advised it would have been better for him to let a school bus full of children drown rather than reveal himself.)