[TimTheTinker]

> Why do you care?

Not OP, but I believe in the rule of law, and in a republic governed by elected officials.

It's not OK for powerful actors, especially companies, billionaires, and government officials, to willingly and knowingly break the law.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

Thank you. I do generally agree with you.

In this particular example with Uber, I see "powerful actors" many decades ago breaking our social contract by using the force of the government to implement a monopoly for their own profit and everyone else's expense. Legal, yes, in the strictest sense of the word, but certainly against what I value about my particular republic (USA).

So Uber here is more "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" than a company I actually admire.

[rstuart4133]

So clearly you aren't a fan of Gandhi. He also very deliberately broke the law. And not a fan of Nelson Mandela either I guess.

Not all laws are good. Using the taxi licencing system as a way of extracting tax income is one example of a "not good" law that somehow wormed it way into many societies.

It might never have changed unless an Uber had some along. The taxi licencing scheme has the unfortunate characteristics of being inefficient but not egregiously so, and had put golden handcuffs on a group of people making a valued contribution to society. Those handcuffs were the taxi licences, which became the taxi drivers retirement fund. The taxi drivers always fought any threat to the value of those licences long and hard. Those two characteristics ensured a politician would spend have to spend a immense amount political capital to fix something that had only a modest benefit. It looked like we were doomed to suffer from this tax parasite forever.

But then a seismic shift in technologies came along, and it was not so easy enforce the laws that protected the parasite. The way I remember it the taxi drivers screamed blue murder as their net worth went rapidly to 0, but the reaction from law enforcement was ... muted. I'm sure with a concerted effort the politicians could have made life so difficult for Uber the parasite could have survived. The taxi drivers certainly thought so. But it looked to me like my republics elected officials chose not to spend political capital on doing that. It was almost like they were glad to have an excuse to rid themselves of a parasite.

Now the carnage of the taxi drivers net worth going to zero is over. That aside, most things have got better. With the monopoly broken there are more taxi companies than there were before, taxi availability has become better since you don't need an expensive licence to put one on the road, and prices have dropped.

Sometimes the ends doesn't justify the means, sometimes it does. This looks like the latter to me.

[sgdfhijfgsdfgds]

> So clearly you aren't a fan of Gandhi. He also very deliberately broke the law.

I have to say this is one of the silliest takes I have ever seen on HN.

You only need to look at the way Gandhi broke the law, the methodology of his disobedience, to see that you cannot possibly make a comparison with Uber that shows them in a good light. It's absurd to draw this comparison.