A lot of the HN-cynic crowd is forgetting here that if anything, they were bypassing stupid sets of regulations. There is nothing ethically or morally wrong here.
For Zenefits/Parker to facilitate and encourage their staff to do it is most certainly ethically wrong.
Telling your staff that they should cheat the rules, sign a false document and perjure themselves is completely unacceptable. Zenefits employees face the risk of jail time because they did what their CEO told them to do - that should never happen and Parker deserved to go for that reason alone.
Or, at most, I will concede that it is not ethically and morally wrong if we concede that the United States is a plutocracy and not a democracy, and there's nothing ethically or morally wrong with a plutocracy.
If these laws are in fact stupid, get them changed. You have tons of money and tons of happy users, right?
More generally, I don't see a good way for our society to collectively figure out the cost/benefit ratio for many regulations other than experimentation (the institutions that should be doing so are permanently out to lunch). It's not ideal, but from my standpoint startup companies pushing boundaries is the best solution we've got for dealing with stagnated industries.
I am pretty okay with even large numbers of companies, with different motivations and financial incentives, all deciding that the same law is stupid. (One case seems to be the export regulations on non-open-source crypto-using software, for instance.) Even if they're all companies, that is much more defensible on democracy and not plutocracy.
Imagine you're an entrepreneur, and you've identified a heavily regulated industry full of sclerotic companies with connections to the regulators that serve large numbers of customers extremely poorly. You believe that you can't break into the market without violating some regulations that have a strongly negative effect on product quality.
What should you do? Go to VCs and ask them to fund a decade-long lobbying campaign with a very high probability of failure in which you pour your heart and soul into getting some obscure regulation in some obscure area that nobody cares about changed, and then afterwards start a company to better serve the customer (along with everyone else who is rushing in to benefit from the lightened regulatory load)? Or try to start a company, show everyone that they regulations are dumb, make customers happy, and then force the regulators to change out of sheer embarrassment?
If we don't occasionally reward people who took the second option (and were right!), I don't think we would get safer, more ethical change, we would just get less and everyone would be worse for it. I'm obviously fine with people who break regulations and end up hurting others being punished to the full extent that the law allows, but there needs to be an escape valve for when the government has it wrong.
You're confounding tyranny of the majority with corruption; the reason marijuana is still criminalized in most places is because a large enough percentage of the population thinks it should be, for whatever reason.
Another example would be the woman who has the gall to braid hair without a license - if she hadn't broken the law, nobody would talk about it, there would never be any chance for reform, and we would all be incrementally poorer for it.
I'm not taking a position on specific laws, just that it's important that some laws occasionally be broken so that as a society we can test whether or not it matters if someone breaks them. If breaking a law doesn't result in negative outcomes, it shouldn't be a law.
The counterpoint is that civil disobedience requires harsh punishment of the disobedience in order to be effective. If somebody flagrantly violates a law because they claim it's bad, and walks away with little to no punishment for doing so, the public's impression will be "well, must not be such a bad law if that's all that happens", which will not serve to change things.