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> I can't turn my hobby/side gig into a small business without navigating a bunch of bureaucracy to obtain 9001 permits

Have you experienced this first hand? In my experience, this gets overstated by those who think any regulation is burdensome. Even the crazy regulatory environments I've been in (like the CO marijuana industry requires separate, complete audit trails of each individual plant "from seed to sale"), the regulations really aren't that bad to comply with. The same people who were complaining about the regs were also complaining about how they had to have benefits for full time employees and the like. There's a very vocal "society shouldn't stop me from making a buck" crowd.

And on top of that, I'm afraid that these people will remove a lot of the good regulation we've built up over the past century as new ways to screw over the public have been discovered.

On the other hand, small business owners shouldnt be allowed to be sleazy either.

Maybe to stimulate small businesses, the government could advise business owners how to navigate these regs, something like a social worker for a business?

The classic example would be food companies requiring the use of a commercial kitchen for selling food to the general public. There are a lot of fledgling businesses that have been shut down immediately because they cannot build capital while they are still in their cottage stage. While it is perfectly fine to invite my neighbors over and cook for them, it immediately crosses the line when I want to sell to them. I think it would be smarter to have progressive laws based on the number of servings instead of immediate high barriers to entry. So you still need to use a commercial kitchen, but only once you serve more than say 5,000 customers per annum. I think most people would believe that this is reasonable. There are countless industries that I think should have similar cottage exceptions.

I'm not sure why you even need to accept the premise. Why is using a non-commercial kitchen sleazy? Such a regulation doesn't make much sense to me for either small or large businesses.

The regulation exists to keep people safe. Poorly handled foods kill people.

Now, if there are high capital requirements for starting a restaurant, it sounds like there is a market opportunity for someone to make a low-capital way to try out restaurant concepts. That's sort of what has happened with food trucks. In Austin, many storefront restaurants existed as food trucks first. Presumably, they got to see that they were a hit without having to spend a ton up front.

I'm still not following. Is it harder to mishandle food in a commercial kitchen? Why is the regulation against non-commercial kitchens, and not just against mishandling of food, if that's the issue?

>Is it harder to mishandle food in a commercial kitchen

Not really. The main difference is that everything you use is better designed to be easy to clean and hard to break by someone putting in less than minimum effort. For a small business that isn't being lazy to the point of negligence there's really no difference. The same standard of cleanliness is indeed possible in a noncommercial kitchen but beyond a certain scale it's not cost effective. Also, it's not a binary thing. You have tons of hole in the wall restaurants that use a mix of commercial and noncommercial facilities and equipment. Somewhere that serves ice cream will probably have commercial style freezers and mid-high end consumer grade stuff for everything else. You don't need stainless counters to prepare ice cream and you don't need a three bay sink or a commercial dishwasher to clean ice cream scoops. Bars in places where they're forced to serve food by law often only have consumer grade equipment for the preparation of said food.

Stimulate is the wrong word here. To avoid harming small businesses regulations usually need to exclude them completely or at least don't put the same regulatory burden on them. But with all that lobbying and regulatory capture harming small businesses is the whole point of regulations.

>The fundamental problem here is that laws and regulations written to deter some megacorp from systemically being sleazy to make a buck apply equally to small businesses.

I don't think that's the _fundamental_ problem, because there are problems leading to that. Capitalism strongly incentivizes against respecting externalities, and regulations are the only effective tool we've found to stop us from (more aggressively) killing ourselves for profit.

That regulations have a cost and this strangles smaller businesses is a serious problem, but the regulations are usually solving an even more serious problem. A more fundamental issue is simply that capitalism left unchecked incentivizes behaviours which are crippling, while checking capitalism to prevent this causes powerful inefficiencies to form.

I don't know if there's a good answer here. Having regulations not apply to small businesses doesn't work, because small businesses are not intrinsically more likely to act against their own financial interests in order to respect externalities than large businesses are.

Then you will have big players like Uber that abuse subcontractors who are small businesses.

Perhaps the model of "run a business" is wrong altogether? Or maybe a simple check... Margin cap. Capping margins is liable to not harm efficiency at all but might instead freeze out some sectors from the market... Hard choices.

I was just typing this out...

Big Corporations helped introduce/fuel more Rules & Regulations to impede smaller rivals who could less afford them.

The Government comes out with some new Rules and Regulations that become Law and will cost you a substantial amount of money year after year creating a more difficult business environment and directly affecting your profitability. In most cases Big Corp will actually support and help implement these new Rules and Regulations knowing full well they can shoulder the additional expense and you can't. Eventually driving you out of the market. This happens with a lot of small businesses. The cost of entry is prohibitive.