Just when you thought the United Nations couldn’t do more harm than it’s already done, the world body is drawing a bead on the world’s taxpayers. “I am convinced that we shall not be able to avoid setting up an international taxation system,”the president of France, Jacques Chirac, said in January. “The debate has already entered the United Nations,” the under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs, José Antonio Ocampo, told the Inter Press Service News Agency. “We have been requested to prepare a study, the results of which will be presented to the General Assembly this year.” Next month, in fact.

The U.N. is considering such proposals as a carbon tax on fuel use, a global lottery, a tax on international airline travel, a tax on arms sales, and a tax on currency transactions.

The idea of a worldwide tax originated with the president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who suggested the tax at the 2003 Group of Eight summit in France as a way to combat hunger.

The executive director of the U.N.’s World Food Program, James Morris, is ecstatic. Said Mr. Morris: “What President Lula has done in raising the issue of world hunger to the top of the world’s agenda is one of the most important things that happened in the last year” — the same year other people associate with the war on terrorism and the Battle of Iraq. In May, Mr. Morris met Mr. Lula in Brasilia to discuss the World Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, Mr. Lula’s initiative to create an anti-hunger fund — dubbed the “Lula Fund” — to be continuously replenished with international levies.

Messrs. Lula and Chirac, along with the president of Chile and the secretary-general of the U.N., signed a joint declaration at a January 2003 meeting in Geneva that formed a World Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty working group to find ways to raise $50 billion a year. “The working group is to make proposals to me,” Mr. Chirac explained at the time, “which I shall, of course, submit to the international community, for establishing a system of taxation.”

It’s not clear that the world really needs a new billion-dollar bureaucracy, but some of the dignitaries’ other suggestions make sense. One of the goals, for example,is to encourage food production in the developing world.To that end, Mr. Annan said, Europe and other developed countries must “open their markets fully to all products from developing countries” and “eliminate all subsidies that subject developing-country producers to unfair competition.”

But Mr. Chirac, despite his denunciations of the “misery and scourges”that accompany world hunger, has signaled his refusal to reduce French agricultural subsidies. He prefers the tax on arms: “The world’s combined military budget amounts to 900 billion dollars per year, half of it accounted for by the United States,” Mr. Chirac told reporters. “So there may be something here to wonder about.”

America already contributes more to the U.N. than any of the body’s other 190 member states, providing 25% of the U.N.’s core budget. This is not to mention all the other funding that goes to U.N. agencies and programs or, for that matter, the prime piece of real estate on the East River that the U.N. occupies rent-free. When the U.N. goes trolling for money, Americans will know to watch their wallets.

The U.N. has also taken upon itself the mission of constraining America through a network of bureaucracies and conventions. A new tax on military spending is only another way of hamstringing American power. While America was fighting terrorism and weapons proliferation in the past year, and ending the human rights abuses of repressive regimes, the world body ostensibly devoted to forestalling the scourge of war was busy forming an “alliance” to raise the world’s taxes.

Reducing world hunger is a worthy goal, but one can have no confidence that the U.N., a failure at so much else, is really up to the task.