What has that got to do with Walgreen and Medtronic? Both are giant for-profit American corporations maneuvering to buy European companies to free themselves from U.S. taxes by moving their headquarters abroad. Walgreen is considering merging with Alliance Boots, a drugstore chain in Europe and moving its base from Illinois to Switzerland; Medtronic is buying competitor Covidien and moving its home from Minneapolis to Ireland. As Steve Pearlstein wrote in The Washington Post about Medtronic, addressing the Medtronic CEO:

The tax-avoidance scheme you have chosen is known as an 'inversion.' It involves buying a competitor, Covidien, for a premium price of $43 billion and then taking its legal headquarters in Dublin as your own. In reality, Covidien is no more Irish than Medtronic. The majority of the sales, employees, and profits (properly calculated) of both companies are still in the United States. The only reason Covidien has its legal address in Ireland is that its previous home, Bermuda, was so transparent a tax dodge that better cover was needed when the company was spun off from Tyco International in 2007.

In The New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes the Walgreen story in a piece titled "At Walgreen, Renouncing Corporate Citizenship." He notes that when Walgreen's CEO sought tax breaks from Illinois a couple of years ago, he said, "We are proud of our Illinois heritage." He got the tax breaks, and now is breaking for Switzerland. Sorkin notes that Walgreen and its subsidiary Duane Reade get almost a quarter of their $72 billion in revenue from the U.S. government—$16.7 billion from Medicare and Medicaid last year. Of course, Walgreen and Medtronic are not alone; many companies are using inversions and more will jump on the bandwagon before long.

Individual Americans have many motives and objectives, some selfish or self-centered or parochial, some more broad-based and altruistic; some focused on family or heritage, some on a region or on the country as a whole; some short-term and some more long-term. But all are based on being American and built around America's national interest. Companies, Alito notwithstanding, have one central motive: profits.

That is not at odds with America's national interest. When General Motors CEO Charles Wilson said to Congress in 1953, "What was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa," he had a point.

For many decades, corporations and corporate leaders took the long view and saw a strong American society as key to their own prosperity. But General Motors, in the global economy, is now a global company, even though it is still based in the U.S. and not yet tempted by inversion. Is what is good for a company with huge interests in dozens of countries necessarily good for America? Will it think first—or at all—about the prosperity and needs of the United States? Maybe—but can we say the same thing about "American" companies renouncing their corporate citizenship? When these companies get involved with politics—and you can be sure before long that the Supreme Court will extend the "speech rights" of corporations to include direct contributions to candidates—will they be thinking of America, or of what America can do to protect their interests in other countries? If the money comes from the "American" subsidiary of the foreign-owned company, will it only be reflecting the desires and interests of that American entity or will it reflect the interests of its parent? If a company with gambling interests in Las Vegas earns most of its money in Macau and gets involved deeply in American campaign finance, will it be most interested in promoting its interest in Macau—which might be counter to America's interest in its foreign relations with China?