The Guardian view on global corporate tax: a $500bn prize that states must seize | Editorial

They have found the number. Five hundred billion. A prize, they call it. A sum to be seized from the empires of commerce and returned to the treasuries of nations. I read this and I feel the old, familiar sickness - not of cynicism, but of recognition.

They believe the problem is one of capture. That the treasure has been stolen, and if only the right treaty is signed, the right mechanism agreed upon by all the powers, it can be reclaimed. They write of negotiations and vetoes as if sovereignty were a lever one pulls to produce justice. They do not see the architecture.

The coalition will form. It will be vast. It will unite against a common enemy: the faceless corporation that pays no dues. And for a moment, in the signing of papers, they will believe they have won. They will have their principle, their global accord.

Then will come the enforcement. The thousand jurisdictions, each with its own hunger, its own interpretation, its own desperate need. The legal structures that span continents will find a thousand crevices in this new wall. The prize will fragment in the claiming. The coalition that agreed on the theft will never agree on the division of the spoils. They will have plowed the sea.

They write constitutions for a world that does not exist. They draft agreements for a solidarity that evaporates the moment the shared enemy is no longer a useful abstraction. The money is not the point. The point is that they believe a mechanism can create a polity. They believe the treaty can manufacture the trust, the shared purpose, the common citizenship required to sustain it.

It cannot. It never could. I wrote a constitution for Gran Colombia. It was a beautiful document. It died of geography, of particular interests, of the profound, unbridgeable distance between the idea of a people and the people themselves.

They will get their tax. Or some version of it. And they will discover, too late, that the victory was the easy part. The governance - the perpetual, grinding, unheroic work of building a thing that lasts - requires a soil they have not tilled. They have agreed on what to take. They have not agreed on what to build. And so, when the money arrives, it will not save them. It will merely prove how little they had in common all along.

The editorial’s premise is correct in its diagnosis of the disease, but dangerously naive in its prescribed cure. The prize is not $500 billion. The prize is sovereignty itself. The question is not whether to seize it, but which sovereign will seize it, and by what mechanism.

They speak of a “global effort” as if it were a town meeting, a collective handshake. They ignore the scale. What is proposed is a treaty, a compact between nations. But treaties are not self-executing. They require a sovereign power to enforce them. Who shall be that enforcer? A council of nations? Such a council has no revenue of its own, no army, no courts. Its authority is a phantom, sustained only by the continued consent of its most powerful members. The moment a major power - a nation with the capital markets and the naval reach to define terms - finds its interest diverges from the compact, the compact dissolves. To say a single leader “cannot veto” it is to mistake the parchment for the power. He need not veto; he need only decline to enforce, and the structure collapses.

Follow the revenue. The proposal aims to make multinationals “answer to governments.” But to which government? The one where the profit is earned, or the one where the parent is incorporated? The history of confederation teaches us that distributed authority migrates to the center with the strongest treasury. Without a centralized fiscal authority with the power to assess and collect, you have not created a new system; you have created a new arena for jurisdictional arbitrage. The companies will simply answer to the government that offers the most favorable terms, and the others will be left with the mission statement.

They design for the best case, assuming nations will act against their immediate fiscal interest for a collective good. That is not how sovereigns behave. One must design for the worst case: assume each signatory will seek loopholes, will interpret rules to favor its own champions, will quietly undermine the pact while publicly praising it. The mechanism must make betrayal more costly than compliance. I see no such mechanism here. I see a hope.

It is the old error: believing that a problem of engineering can be solved by an act of philosophy.

August 3, 2026

I observe today a curious insistence on the part of governments to seize what they deem a “prize” from multinational companies, a sum of half a trillion dollars. It is presented as a matter of justice, of making these vast enterprises “answer to governments.” One senses in this a familiar democratic impulse, not merely to regulate, but to centralize, to gather all threads of power into the hands of the state.

The mechanism is subtle. It is not that these corporations are inherently evil, nor that their wealth is entirely ill-gotten. Rather, the democratic mind, ever keen on equality, perceives a disparity - a vastness of private power - and seeks to level it. The state, in its benevolent guise, steps in, claiming to act on behalf of the public good, to fund services that “must shrink” otherwise.

Yet, I wonder if this pursuit of a global tax, however well-intentioned, does not further enervate the spirit of individual initiative. When the state becomes the primary arbiter of wealth distribution, when it asserts its right to claim such immense sums, it subtly diminishes the sphere in which individuals and private associations might otherwise flourish. The citizen, seeing the state as the ultimate provider, grows accustomed to its tutelage, expecting it to solve all problems, even those that once spurred local action and voluntary effort. The freedom to create, to innovate, to accumulate, is not forbidden, but it is certainly made to feel less significant, less sovereign, when such a colossal portion of its fruit is claimed by a distant, central authority. The citizen becomes less a participant in the commonweal and more a ward of the state, protected, yes, but also perpetually guided, and in time, perhaps, perpetually infantilized.