When you have digested the fact Apple Inc has just posted the biggest quarterly profits in the history of capitalism, a bit of ready reckoning - use all your fingers - is advised.

How does a maker of gadgets churn more cash than any other enterprise known to man? Why does the company choose to sit on a $142 billion mountain of idle money? How much tax will Apple pay on £11.8bn of three-month profits derived from the odd fact that 74.5 million people prefer one brand of phone?

Apple is about to become the victim of its own stupendous success. Governments around the world, most of them strapped for cash, can no longer ignore the fact that a maker of sleek toys expends a lot of its spare resources on tax avoidance. Where Apple is concerned, those governments have reached the logic of Butch Cassidy: "If he'd just pay me what he's spending to make me stop robbing him, I'd stop robbing him".

No one is robbing Apple. Around the world, in fact, taxation for the company has become the equivalent of a parking ticket. According to a report prepared for the US Senate, some $9bn that might have been paid to the country in 2012 found a home elsewhere. In the same year, Apple paid Her Majesty's Government £10 million in corporation tax on estimated sales of £6bn. Try asking HMRC for that deal.

There is an industrial estate in the vicinity of Cork that makes all of this possible. You wouldn't call the place beautiful, but for Apple it is a work of art. The company has three businesses in the Republic of Ireland through which at least 60 per cent of its stupendous earnings are funnelled. The US, fount of capitalism, imposes a 35 per cent corporation tax rate; Ireland asks only 12.5 per cent on trading income. So far - for Apple - so good.

But you can never be too greedy. If a "Dutch sandwich" doesn't meet your accounting needs - book sales through a Netherlands brass plate, shift profits through the Caymans - you haven't mastered "double Irish". As accountants and otherwise-moral people understand, it's just a dodge to beat US transfer pricing rules. It requires finance ministries to pretend Ireland is Apple's home. It has turned a democracy into a fiefdom for the sake of "tax competition". And - to state the obvious - it stinks.

Ireland, to be fair, is making life a little less congenial for the company. The genius idea, supposedly taking effect around now, is that you should be tax-resident in the state in which you incorporate. Apple is tremendously upset by the slur. In reality, neither the firm - nor Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Starbucks and the rest - will be out of pocket. It will just nominate some other corporate colony, probably Bermuda, as its "tax residence" and carry on as before.

Here, things become interesting. Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory. Like most of the world's havens from tax, it depends on a colonial pretence for its existence. Successive British governments have insisted all such places must cease to rely on funny money. Barack Obama's administration has been equally firm on the topic. But Apple and the other trans-national giants have responded with a familiar challenge: Come ahead, if you think you're hard enough.

The firm would never use such words, of course. Apple meets all its legal obligations wherever it operates. It sells things people like and manages its tax affairs in a rational way while respecting all local codes to the letter. If it happens not to pay any tax worth mentioning, that only proves how smart and savvy Apple is, right?

In Silicon Valley, they truly believe it. The juvenile libertarian billionaire hippies who sell a networked future don't care for government. Philosophically - they can Google the word - they consider their techno-toys to be of greater human value than any dull stuff involving roads or health care or social responsibility. Tax avoidance is rational, therefore impeccably correct. In the Valley, that's as close as anyone needs to get to moral.

Apple Inc has $142bn in various bank accounts. According to one of the better jokes you might see on your iPhone, that's three Lithuanias. In economic terms, it makes the company more powerful than most of the tinpot places where people do quaint things like vote for the individuals who might just maintain an accident and emergency service, or educate a child. So what is that tax-managed $142bn for?

To my knowledge, no one at Apple has attempted an explanation. The proud and prosperous Americans who hold Apple stock don't often boast they mean to create more Chinese factory jobs. The task of keeping Ireland from penury doesn't come up, from what I can see, in the PR literature. A great American enterprise does not even seem to regard its $142bn as a contribution to the health and wealth of the American republic. In this age, that's not what money means.

Apple and Google - $4.76bn in profits in the fourth quarter - have taken a tip from their friends on Wall Street and in the City. Not only are they too big to fail, they are too big to question. Contemplate the absurd numbers, they suggest, and shut up. Shut up, indeed, or we'll take our business, our minimal taxes and precious few real jobs, elsewhere. We are bigger than any government. Deal with it. And governments are cowed.

In this argument, the questions over tax are democracy's proxy votes. You could ask, first, why any enterprise is able to shirk its responsibilities. You could wonder why most decent employers meet all their responsibilities while a pillaging few are on the dodge. You could reason, in a subversive mood, that gigantic profits in an era of imposed austerity do not answer to common sense. The average American is as badly off, in real terms, as he or she has been for generations, but Apple is making fortunes. How come?

An answer would involve peering into the murk. You might deplore the fact Apple salts away much of its 40 per cent gross profit margin. Perhaps people are silly; perhaps the products are very good: there's no accounting for taste where flat phone batteries are concerned. It doesn't answer the question: how does any enterprise get away with $142bn when times are hard?

A half-astute finance minister can spot a cash cow. A hard-up electorate can meanwhile grasp a basic argument: some, for reasons never discussed, have it easy. A natural conservative will tell you that all taxation is an infringement on liberty, damaging both to enterprise and human rights. The rest of us might respond, to coin a cliché, that we are all in this together, that capitalism's rights involve responsibilities, and that it is no bad thing to, when asked, pony up what you're due.

We can all tell when we're being conned. For the avoidance of doubt, meanwhile, no Apple product was involved in the making of this piece. That's not my idea of profit.