JAMES MADISON never played with an iPhone, but he might have had something to say about the news last weekend about Apple. Over the last few years, the company has avoided paying billions of dollars in state and federal taxes by routing profits through subsidiaries based in tax havens from Reno, Nev., to the Caribbean.

This is a common practice among major American businesses, and back in 1787, Madison saw it coming. Someday, he warned, companies could grow so large they “would pass beyond the authority of a single state, and would do business in other states.” To make sure the companies remained accountable to government, he said the federal government should “grant charters of incorporation in cases where the public good may require them, and the authority of a single state may be incompetent.”

In other words, a National Companies Act.

Such an act would create a common corporate architecture for all American companies doing business across state lines and internationally. It would establish not only uniform tax policies but also national standards for the structure of corporate boards, the power of chief executives, the relations of management with workers and shareholders and the interaction of American companies with other nations. National companies would have to abide by national rules, and the option of shopping around for the most favorable laws or tax policies simply wouldn’t exist.

It’s an idea that has been proposed and pursued many times, particularly during the early 1900s, when companies like Standard Oil, which was a collection of companies incorporated in various states and assembled into a national “trust,” were becoming increasingly powerful. Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and, later, Franklin D. Roosevelt all supported the creation of a national companies law, but the measures were consistently opposed by the business community and eventually defeated.