I'm not republican, nor is it a matter of me not caring, but the current system is broken and corrupt, change is coming, change is inevitable. Some here are proposing we prop up the existing corruption and prolong the pain by keeping the existing protected monopoly, something that in the US at least is illegal, except when it's not, often because of mafia owned politicians. This is a matter of either rip the bandaid off quickly, or continue to slowly tug at it from different directions and suffer. How should they modernize? Develop an app that can be used for hailing a cab, make it work as seamlessly as Uber, because there is a whole generation of people coming that expects it to work like this. There are people of adult age today who have never existed in a world without internet and mobile phones. Get rid of the extortion pricing on certain routes like trips to and from airports. Keep the cars, clean, have the ability to rate the drivers, this is the sort of thing a little competition is good for.
It's very similar to the music situation, digital downloads were coming whether the industry liked it or not. Very quickly people started to expect to be able to download their music instantly and play it on any number of different devices. The industry could have easily seen this coming, modernized and embraced it, and made a killing selling digital downloads (as Apple eventually proved) but instead they kicked and screamed and fought and resisted the change, trying to force maintaining the status quo through various legislation and legal battles to stamp out the digital revolution and look at what happened, they lost. People who had for years been forced to bend over and take it suddenly had an alternative and they took it. Fighting this sort of paradigm shift is futile.
Now as for industries I love, these paradigm shifts happen in all industries, software is one that I'm involved in which has changed tremendously over the years. Perhaps the fact that "adapt or die" has always been an integral part of my career path causes me to have less sympathy for those who refuse to adapt and try to fight the change instead because it's so obvious to me that is a losing battle. I don't think anyone was passing laws to ban transistors or ICs in order to protect all the people who had their livelihoods tied up in vacuum tube manufacturing and servicing of tube equipment. We didn't ban C++ to protect all the COBOL and Fortran developers. Things change, they always have changed, they always will change.