He may have barely have been making a profit but the fact of the matter is it would've cost him $100,000 to get papers/certified but he instead spent $200,000 on a new sub. It just seems like the kind of thing that would actually be considered an investment because it could make you more profitable and definitely adds more credibility.
I'd take the sub ride.
The problem that I see with regulation is that it's hard to apply it intelligently to each case, so broad, sweeping regulations are made when other, more practical solutions may solve the problem. My pet peeve is the banning of smoking in Boston (I don't smoke and have never been a smoker). Make the law something like "smoke will be undetectable in non-smoking areas to with x parts-per-billion" or something, and let somebody figure out how to build a cheap negative-pressure room for smoking areas in restaurants. Instead, we get "no smoking allowed."
I actually suspect that in a lot of cases (good) regulations help businesses by establishing some trust in the customers' minds.
There comes a point when all that's left is the question, "how many people can be injured in kitchen accidents per X-thousand fed?" People have become strongly conditioned to insist the answer must be zero. So they pass a laws so that there can only be completely safe kitchens. The law fails because instead of safe kitchens, as intended by lawmakers, there are NO kitchens.
I suppose in a perverted way, you could argue that the law actually was a perfect success. All 0 kitchens are completely safe.
Same with jets. And buildings. The home construction industry in Miami generally concluded that the codes required on houses there were too strict and expensive, so many did not comply. They could have argued that with the rules there wouldn't be houses.
Then Hugo came, and there were (no longer) houses. Plus, we had an expensive mess to clean up.
So just because something is not allowed to happen because it doesn't meet code doesn't mean that the code failed. Perhaps the code did exactly what it was supposed to do.
There are a whole set of laws in the first world that create an absurdly high barrier to entry for certain activities. Instead of making the activities safer, as intended, they simply make them impossible/unprofitable/implausible.
A soup kitchen that fed the homeless near me was forced to close because they could not afford to install a centralized halon fire extinguisher system to meet commercial kitchen code. Instead of making the volunteers and the homeless marginally safer, the volunteers went home to watch TV and the homeless were SOL. Law->Fail.
Different cultures experience risk/reward in different ways. Safety above ALL else is a distinctly first-world/western notion.