And the correct way to change that in a modern democracy is to lobby for better laws in parliament and/or found your own party and then win the population’s votes to fix your issue.
Wilfully ignoring existing laws implies a fundamental lack of respect for society and democracy.
A government, as governed by its citizens. That's what laws are for.
The people are the system, it is impossible for the system “democratic society” to disrespect “the people”. I also did not say that one must respect immoral laws, I said that breaking laws implies disrespect for the way by which these laws were put into place – namely the free democratic society.
You can disrespect immoral laws all day long and I encourage you to do so, just don’t break them unless absolutely necessary (because the alternative would be much worse). Taxi transportation is such a triviality that it certainly doesn’t qualify for that.
In general terms, labor laws such as wage prohibitions and occupational licensing tend to give relatively economically advantaged workers artificial advantages over lower skilled workers. In this respect, they serve as upwards redistribution of wealth and opportunity. At the same time, they restrict consumer sovereignty and the ability for people to freely engage in commerce. Of course, there are counter arguments to these as well. My intent here is not to make any overly simplistic sweeping claims, but to point out that there are some thoughtful and powerful lines of reasoning that call into question the morality of many existing labor regulations.
I don't believe we disagree on this. Labor laws are a balance between the right of a citizen to earn a living wage and the right of a consumer to engage in commerce permitted by the State.
With that said, I believe that consumer sovereignty should never take precedence over labor rights.
Because the buggymaker's job is more important than the consumer's right to buy an automobile?
1. Can work on my own schedule. "When I was a Taxi driver, I had to show up at the dispatcher to pick up a car on their schedule." 2. Driving someone else's car. "Sometimes I sit 2 hours waiting for a car to be returned to begin my shift, often it is dirty and I am required to clean it before taking it out." 3. Freedom to engage in a side business. "My wife makes jewelry, I display it on the back seat and sell it to tourists who are interested." 4. Higher pay. Yes, there are studies that try to debunk this by citing higher costs or higher variability, but the arguments are unpersuasive. They count the cost of a driver maintaining his Uber car, while treating the medallion company's maintenance as a benefit, but an UberX driver and a Taxi Cab driver who owns a personal vehicle both pay car maintenance costs, albeit there's more wear and tear on the UberX car. Likewise, while variability is higher in salary, so is freedom in work hours and Uber drivers consistently rate this as the most loved feature of being an Uber driver.
This isn't really about labor laws, this is about regulatory capture. The French government has created an artificial shortage of supply, assigned special rights to a Guild, which simultaneously jacks up prices and provides more inconvenience to the customer, while establishing a monopoly in which bad drivers with bad attitudes can't be contested.
It then lets this group which has performed regulatory capture, essentially engage in mass property damage, terror (smashing cars with people in them), actions which are inherently dangerous and could lead to people getting killed on the roads, all without arresting them, or making them criminally or civilly liable.
What will France do if the entire world moves to self-driving vehicles? Will they ban them to protect French Taxi cab drivers? Will you claim the Robots are Slaves? What would they do if public transport threatened Taxi Cab driver salaries if some new public transport system made cabs less needed?
The French government has allowed itself to be captured by a minority industry. This isn't about broad labor rights, it's about a small guild trying to protect its monopoly by holding the government / citizenry hostage with violent protests.
French labour laws in general overwhelmingly advantage the older(as in already employed), and established workers and disadvantage younger workers and new entrants.
In part because they not pay social security like everyone else and that is part of how they drive the prices down.
Software developers have deal with unregulated competition and do quite well.
EDIT (to respond to your EDIT):
> Software developers have deal with unregulated competition and do quite well.
The level of knowledge and critical thinking required to develop (quality) software is a bit greater than that required to drive a vehicle. I'd argue that as additional resources are developed/released to aid people learning to code, along with resources that make writing code remotely with a team more painless, the value of software developers as a whole will drop.
Why should someone be paid quite a high salary, for job that in your words requires a lower education? Shall we mandate all jobs should be paid well? If low skill jobs pay almost as well as high skill/high paying jobs, where's the economic incentive in increasing your skills? In many ways its a trap, because you won't go out of your way to increase your skills.
And when people say Taxi driving is actually quite a high skill job. I say you should have no problem fighting off the competition then.
"software developers as a whole will drop." And on that day, I'll get an MBA instead proving that the incentives work.
Regarding your MBA:
“A degree has value only if the degree is scarce, and the MBA is completely unscarce,” says Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2313a2f8-7c81-11e3-b514-00144feabd...
There is no free lunch. If you introduce regulation to protect a group of people, another group of people loses out.