Wealth & Money Quote by Susan George

The line lands like a backhanded joke with teeth: the state can always find you, but it can’t seem to pin down a multinational. Susan George frames tax injustice not as an abstract policy failure but as a rigged geography. “We’re rooted somewhere” isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a diagnosis of power. Ordinary people have bodies, homes, payrolls, bank accounts - all the fixed points governments can tax with ease. Corporations, by contrast, have lawyers, subsidiaries, and the magic trick of being everywhere and nowhere at once.

Her most effective move is the conversational “right?” It pulls the listener into complicity, as if the unfairness is so obvious it barely needs argument. That intimacy matters: it shifts tax talk from technocratic spreadsheets to lived experience, the creeping sense that compliance is for the stationary. The quip “they’ve got our address” carries a quiet menace. It suggests surveillance and enforcement are not neutral tools; they’re selectively deployed, efficient when aimed downward and oddly clumsy when aimed upward.

Contextually, George is speaking from a long arc of anti-globalization critique: decades of deregulation, offshore finance, and “tax competition” that turned corporate mobility into leverage over public budgets. The intent is political, not just moral - to reframe corporate tax minimization as a transfer of obligation onto citizens, and to make that transfer feel personal. She’s indicting a system where mobility has become a get-out-of-paying card, and rootedness a liability.