If that is the standard, perhaps Senator Paul, instead of apologizing to Apple for the fact that the hearing was being held, should have joined in what he called the “vilification” of the company, but for an entirely different reason. As Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, testified, there is a whole range of tactics Apple has chosen not to use.

“Apple does not hold money on a Caribbean Island, does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands, and does not move any taxable revenue from sales to U.S. customers to other jurisdictions in order to avoid U.S. taxation,” he said.

I asked Jeffrey M. Kadet, who spent a career with large accounting firms helping companies to minimize their international tax payments — working in places like China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Russia — and now teaches tax law at the University of Washington, to review the subcommittee’s report on Apple.

“Apple’s basic structure and planning described in the memorandum appears to be appropriate corporate tax planning in today’s environment and is consistent with what I review with my students in class,” he said in an e-mail. “The company appears to be almost conservative in its approach of not trying to move any portion of profits on sales to U.S. customers into its overseas structure as some other groups have done.”

One such company, as the Senate subcommittee documented last year, is Apple’s archrival, Microsoft.

What Apple did was transfer rights to its intellectual property to a subsidiary that was incorporated in Ireland — and therefore not subject to immediate United States taxation — but managed in California. Under Irish law, that freed the subsidiary from Irish taxation.

How is that “almost conservative”? The Irish subsidiary has rights to the company’s patents and trademarks in Asia, Africa and Europe, but not in North or South America. Apple kept those rights in its United States operation. It thus appears to pay more United States taxes than it could have.

If you look at taxes as Senator McCain seems to do, one person finding a way around taxes means the rest of us have to pay more. After all, the government must raise enough money to meet its obligations. But that is not the way a lot of Republicans look at it now. They have denounced taxes for so long that some of them seem to view those who manage to legally avoid paying taxes as heroes. Some of them also seem to think that the government they help to run is evil and that depriving it of revenue is therefore a good thing.