The issue is that the users are not capable of overseeing the consequences of their actions, and when you function in a shared system that is not great. (understatement of the year)
Even technically skilled users won't benefit from a construction of 'trust on first use', when was the last time you verified the host key of a system you SSH'ed into for the first time? How do you trust a system purely on something like that? And even then, when you got an error that the host key no longer matched, did you go on a research run to figure out how this might have happened, or did you just replace the key in your local known hosts cache and went on with your day?
What about websites, do you disable all CA's and just use local key pinning on all the websites that you visit? This is something you could do right now. But you won't, and neither will anyone else because it is far too inconvenient. It makes the entire thing useless. And every time you send an email, are you going to verify the fingerprint of the supplied certificate as well?
While it might not obvious to you, the feasibility of this at scale is something you can figure out by simply talking to users, looking at A/B test, comparative research, and looking at the security configuration of various user's systems and asking why they might have chosen the configuration as it is, and what the impact to them, the people they interface with and the internet as a whole might be.
wrt phone taps: it's possible and not the point (and not useful; the Americans did plenty of local and global taps and almost none of the broad taps yielded anything useful over 10 years, it was only the highly targeted taps that yielded real results). It's also not froth, "locking up stuff" and "straight jackets". It's about a hard problem, with everybody having an opinion but nobody having a solution. And the only thing people seem to want to do in such a scenario is apply a scorched earth policy which besides the obvious destruction doesn't yield a solution either. With the current devices and services there is so much personal data, proximity and interaction that the value and impact is much higher than your landline at home. The point isn't to make it perfect or perfectly secure, but to make it hard enough that it isn't an attractive broad-spectrum target anymore. Making it cryptographically hard to hack into a baseband, a bootrom or kernel is a very effective method to make this protection a reality, and so far there has not been a successful alternative presented by anyone, anywhere.
Ultimate absolute liberty is a fallacy, externalities exist, and society doesn't work in anarchy (but doesn't flourish in strict hierarchy either). Until you can manipulate time and space, and modify matter at a subatomic level, you are and will always be dependant on externalities, and as such you have to work with those. How hard you make it for yourself or others depends on the degree of society and civilisation you can live with. You don't control the BGP tables on your ISP's routers, but that seems to be fine for all the millions of users. But all of this is straying away from the topic at hand quite significantly.
(Edit;) As to the 'value status-quo business plans': that is not something we value, but something the producers of some large-scale hardware and software manufacturers value. They aren't society's friend, but they do need it to buy its products. And if the USP of the product is something you want to remove, then the manufacturer is probably going to try to prevent that. This would be 'fixed' by you getting what you want and they getting what they want, but that is not technically feasible (or: has not been shown to be technically feasible yet), hence the long blocks of text describing that problem.