The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
How do Wizards make a living?
morriswalters:
You only have to screw up once and you could be dead. And any house with 200k is going to be part of some larger criminal conspiracy. I'm not saying a wizard couldn't pull it off, but as Harry points out he is just as vulnerable to a bullet as you and me.
Consider it as a person who will live three hundred plus years. At 70 you are young, more or less equivilant to a mortal who is 25. Less than one quarter of your presumed life span. If you die before 100 you have lost a lot of life.
Bad Alias:
I figure the risk, for a wizard who plans it out, is less than having a job that involves the frequent use of heavy machinery, including cars. Even if the organization is wise to the supernatural, how are they going to figure out who burgled them? In a good burgling, no one knows what happened until the burglar is long gone. It's not like this wizard is going to place an ad in the phone book. (And if it's that wizard who did, we've seen that he is maybe a little too comfortable with risk).
And if you spend a quarter of your life grinding to make your fortune, you've wasted a lot of life.
Bad Alias:
To get back to the main point, it's going to be very hard for wizards to go grocery shopping in this day and age, let alone have any sort of common career. Computers are ubiquitous. We probably don't realize how common they are. If a wizard had a common career, he would need to go about it in a unique way.
I can't really think of any 9-5 a wizard could do that avoids technology.
Kindler:
Honestly, the real problem is going to be maintaining a viable legal identity for tons of long-lived wizards. The IRS (or someone) is going to come a-knocking when you're 160 years old. Hell, you get a congratulatory letter from the Oval Office for living to be a hundred. It'd be kinda funny if Eb has a couple of them gathering dust in his study. "This one is from Grant. This one should have been from Kennedy, but I got it from LBJ, that jerk."
The point is that it used to be pretty easy to fake an identity. You used to be able to apply for a Social Security Number for newborns by mail, and there was virtually zero verification. Wizards could set things up a decade or three in advance and apply for the legal documents for their next identity, then wait until they look about the right age for the new one, and "kill" the old one, inheriting their own assets. No idea how they'd be able to manage it now, with the sheer volume of electronic recordkeeping necessary to even apply for that kind of thing. Peabody could've made an absolute killing if he wasn't a traitorous douche nozzle.
Harry's probably not thinking about things now, since I assume he assumes he's going to die young, but I'd imagine he'll start thinking about it with Maggie around.
Bad Alias:
I imagine that the biggest problem with maintaining an identity would be if you were collecting social security long after you should be dead. Even if you were one of those people who always looked older than you were, as a wizard you would look way younger than 100+ when you were 100+. If the government decided to investigate your collection of social security, they'd be sure you weren't you. Otherwise, as long as you're paying taxes, the IRS is unlikely to investigate.
What do you need an identity for? Paying income taxes. Collecting government benefits. Travel. Buying booze. Buying guns. Getting credit? Any sort of licensing. Banking.
Plenty of that could be solved by getting id from, and banking in, a foreign country. Travel is already a problem, and the solution is to "cheat," as Dresden puts it, using the Ways. Then there's just breaking the law by not paying taxes, black market gun buying, and just not obtaining the "necessary" licensing. Trusts, llc's, lp's, corporations, and such would be very useful for a lot of these problems, but you would still run into tax/tax id problems.
All of this is probably moot because I think the White Council has paperwork for maintaining an id with the government. I base this on Rashid talking to Dresden about fixing his presumed dead situation with the government. I know that's a little different, but I assume the Council has procedures for this because the Council wants to maintain secrecy, and it has to be an issue that has been around for a while. I imagine it's the type of thing they want to stay on top of.
On the other hand, a lot this has only come up recently. Money laundering only became illegal in 1986, which is a much narrower thing than I previously thought, but there are all sorts of regulations that have come up after that to hinder money laundering and tax evasion that would get in the way of maintaining your official financial existence. Then a lot of new laws are coming into effect now to combat fake ids because of 9/11.
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