IMAGINE I launched a new high street store. Let’s call it Avarice. In Avarice, excess is on tap: designer clothes, expensive sports cars, fine jewellery, and multi-million pound mansions. Soon my firm attracts criticism for selling elitism and greed. “Elitist?”, I could reply in exasperation. “We’re open to all customers!”

That defence would be ridiculous. Yet it’s been used to defend the latest fall out from the Panama Papers scandal and David Cameron’s tax affairs. Journalist Isabel Oakeshott, responding to the news that Cameron’s mother gave him £200,000 in 2011 as part of an inheritance tax loophole, said the tax dodge was “legal and available to anyone”.

Like shopping in Avarice, it’s available if you have £200,000 in spare cash. That’s the nature of inheritance and dodging thousands of pounds in tax: they are privileged experiences dominated by the middle and upper classes.

Own a home? Have lawyers or accountants to organise your financial affairs? Then you’re fortunate enough to have the choice to pass on a high level of wealth, while minimising your tax liabilities. That process of family preservation – although mundane in each isolated case – entrenches inequality from one generation to the next.

Supporters of inheritance, tax havens and tax dodging point to a common defence: it’s legal. And that’s true. Setting up shell companies, transferring profits between corporations, receiving pay above £150,000 in shares are all within the law. They do, however, contribute to great deal of global and domestic suffering. All sorts of non-illegal activity, it is worth remembering, is also immoral.

My store, Avarice, could follow the lead of high street competition and transfer its UK income through Monaco’s tax system. I could then use that wealth to buy my children access to a top private school, fund places at exclusive universities, and – through wealthy society – use my connections to get my son a job in the Conservative Party and PR industry. My wealth, as I die, will naturally be slashed in the tax haven of Jersey. Tax collectors and common good be damned!

Cameron’s transition from son of an offshore financier to powerful politician was, in a similar fashion, built on this social inheritance. He’s been playing the computer game of life on easy mode since he was born. That’s the result of inheritance and it has widespread implications.

No longer – given the scale of inequality in the housing market – can passing on a home be considered a normal financial transaction. Receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in unearned, untaxed wealth is the biggest financial boost any individual is likely to receive in their lives.

Those that do inherit gain security based purely upon a birth lottery. If we are serious about reducing wealth inequalities, then increasing inheritance tax or reforming high property values is unavoidable.

The current threshold of £325,000 to pay any inheritance tax is well above the majority of Scottish house prices. The loop hole, used by Cameron, of large chunks of wealth in “gift” form could also be closed through future tax reform.

This can raise difficult emotions. Why should I pay extra tax for wanting to pass money on when I die? Why shouldn’t my children be able to inherit a property value in full? Can’t we tax someone or something else?

Yet the belief that wealth is purely a “private matter”, as David Cameron described it, cannot coexist with a just society. Passing on wealth, even when built on the noblest of intentions, cannot be allowed to entrench damaging inequalities that divide us.

All wealth is created as a result of our collective work. Property rights and businesses are protected by the state. Each family benefits from shared services and community. Even if you work incredibly hard, there remains a social duty to pay back into the collective pot.

Accountancy expert Richard Murphy called this “The Joy of Tax”. Rather than fret over those bureaucratic and time consuming tax forms, perhaps we can recognise the important purpose and benefits of progressive taxation.

For inheritance, that would require a culture shift to reject the types of practices that Cameron and the Tories view as standard accounting. It applies to all of us to overturn the insidious logic that pressures each tax payer to place themselves above all else.

Avoiding financial responsibility is more widespread than a handful of conniving corporate capitalists. The feeling that greed is good and tax avoidance a duty, hangs over the Panama Papers scandal.

Don’t we all just want to limit our contribution, cut corners and lighten the pressure on our pay checks? Wouldn’t we all set up a tax haven firm to siphon off UK income if we had the know how?

The answer is that we want a society that is different, fairer and as a consequence includes forgoing inheritance that would be better spent by those who need it most.