Eventually, when we're much much older, we may start reading in the newspapers about miscarriages of justice. We realise the system is flawed. We may encounter laws or regulations that don't make much sense. We may decide that laws in other countries are unjust. But the notion that breaking the law is inherently immoral is ingrained very deep and is very hard to discard. Does English even have a word for an act which is illegal yet moral? I can't think of one. The closest is the concept of civil disobedience, but somewhere along the line that notion got linked with the idea that you have to put yourself up for arbitrary punishment as part of the "protest".
I think this isn't quite right.
You suggest obedience to seemingly unjust laws is solely due to the fact we've been conditioned to equate respect for the law with morality, but I think there's a far more pragmatic aspect to it as well. Humans are spectacularly good at rationalization, it is really easy to convince yourself that a self-serving act is moral. Therefore your default assumption should be to respect the law even when it seems wrong because you might be rationalizing an immoral behaviour.
The second part of that is your concept of what's moral may not agree with my concept of what's moral. We need a way to negotiate a common set of rules we can both agree with, this is the law.
That doesn't mean civil disobedience shouldn't be used to make a political statement, nor does it mean that laws are sometimes so bad they should be ignored, but it does mean that your default position should be to respect the law because violating it carries a very high risk of acting immorally.
I simply don't see taxi regulations as such an unjust inhibition of freedom that they can simply be disregarded.
In a few parts of the world, it might have been possible to launch something a bit like Uber without any serious changes and with a cooperative partnership with the local taxi regulators. But it seems from practical experience that this would exclude vast chunks of the worlds population. And without economies of scale, perhaps Uber wouldn't be anything like what it is. So we have a case where to make progress, technologically, the law must be broken on a massive scale. But of course if the law ceases to be respected ..... where do you draw the line?
So start in those districts, show it works, and give other districts a chance to evaluate and update their laws.
What Uber is doing is ignoring the law to that if/when their practices are legalized they'll be entrenched as the dominant market player and newcomers who played by the rules will be shut out. This is why I oppose Uber in particular.
