It was also my impression that Hogwarts was part of wizarding government and therefore supported by magic taxes.

ah ... they're under a Republican budget (sorry - couldn't resist)

No, under a Republican budget, you remove magic taxes and wait for the economy to improve.

No, under a Republican budget, you remove magic taxes and lay all the Ministry staff off and cancel all the contracts with vendors and consultants and wait for the economy to improve.

Fixed that for you, as they say. *grins*

Yeah, worldbuilding fails under close inspection, but that's not new to YA, or to sci fi and fantasy in general. I think she's doing pretty well with what she's put forward to convey emotion and adventure and excitement and horror, since I'm sure that was her major goal, not putting all the building blocks of a functional society in place.

Yep, what ita said.

I keep thinking of a fanfic I remember a ton of non-Buffista people raving about the general wonderfulness of, "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," which was one fan's attempt to just straight-up rewrite the series, but with more logic and science. The first couple of chapters were utterly brain-twisting and charming as all hell, but oh dear God did those returns ever diminish.

By something like the 30th installment (fortunately each was only a couple of pages long), Ron had disappeared because he wasn't bright enough to be interesting to the author; by the time I gave up and walked away twitching, at chapter 50 or something, Harry was running the school, Hermione and Draco were his only intellectual equals and thus his bestest frenemies, Hagrid was nigh invisible, and Harry's foster parents were loving and supportive and thrilled at the ways he was pushing the envelopes of philosophy and chemistry and physics with his scientific analysis of this "magic" stuff.

It was all very logical and rational and consistent, and the author was very careful not to leave an i un-dotted or a t un-crossed, and there wasn't one single plot thread that wasn't carefully laid out or one single twist on the original plot that wasn't very rationally followed to its logical conclusion. And it was (for me anyway) nigh unreadable. Harry was an insufferable little prick, Hermione was a Mary Sue to make other Mary Sues hide their heads in shame, Dumbledore was a monster, Ron was a nonentity (with no Ron-like replacement, because apparently the very existence of people like Ron was intrinsically uninteresting to this writer), and all this beautiful craftsmanship and intricate rational thinky-brain writing had sucked every atom of joy or emotional weight out of it.

Rowling is sloppy as hell with a lot of real-world details, and grossly unrealistic in a lot of ways, but after that fic I kind of let all that go. Her kids and adults are all prickly and messy and flawed and true, and she will always sacrifice logical consistency to go for the reader's gut or heart or lizard brain, and it's a fair exchange. Having read a good chunk of what the series might be like with those priorities flipped, I'm on her side.

Not that heart and logical consistency together wouldn't be even better, but, as a reader, if I have to pick just one then I definitely know which it'll be.

Not that heart and logical consistency together wouldn't be even better, but, as a reader, if I have to pick just one then I definitely know which it'll be.

Which is one reason why I love Farscape so much: because in a contest between logic and drama, drama wins every time.

That said, I retain the right to poke at the holes in the tapestry, because it is great fun for me. I wouldn't do it to this extent if I weren't still enjoying the series.

I don't think Harry cares much about the funding of the school, so someone would have to make a point of telling him where the money comes from, and that would be a point where lots of people would say, "Why is this here? How does this forward the story?"

It would make a bit of sense for Uncle Vernon to say something like "We're not paying for him to go there" and Hagrid to explain where the money came from in the scene where Hagrid first meets Harry in Sorcerer's Stone, but really, that would have just added even more detail at a point where the book really didn't need it. (I've been rereading, and I'd forgotten how it takes until about a third of the way through the book before they even get to Hogwarts.)

It would make a bit of sense for Uncle Vernon to say something like "We're not paying for him to go there" and Hagrid to explain where the money came from in the scene where Hagrid first meets Harry in Sorcerer's Stone

But why? What does that add to the average British teen kid's enjoyment of the story? They're not concerned with how school gets paid for, most probably.

Teen is also assuming older than a lot of the readership was and is, in the U.S. anyway. Kids as young as nine and ten were reading these when they came out, and the demographic for children's and teen books usually skews a lot younger than you'd think.