This should be a cautionary tale to people who dream about society without government and its regulations. Imagine if someone makes an "experimental and innovative" nuclear reactor that explodes and gives radiation sickness + cancer to hundreds of thousands. Or someone makes an "experimental and innovative" dam that collapses and floods houses. Invisible hand of the market won't be able to undo the damage or prevent it in the future from repeating again.
I think most people are fine with regulations as long as it is reasonable. The problem is that the one who runs the system can't be trusted, which is hard to solve since you can't simply tell everyone to "try to participate in governance then".
-cut-
Thing is that most likely Rush thought that his way of doing things were reasonable as well. As most of us aren't deep sea experts with submarines and deeps sea like Rush wasn't. Most of us aren't experts in political science either. And countries have move moving parts than submarines.
And even when everything affects to everything and there are countless of studies about political science and how to keep careful balance, for some reason people who haven't read one book think that they know best what are reasonable regulations.
And since you already wrote that people running that sub were bunch of idiots, what do you think rest of the human kind is like, who think they know what's reasonable regulation?