what do Americans think about the NSA scandal

[Jester]

More likely, I would say, that totalitarianism is the de facto lazy model of governance. It requires the least maintenance to be a sheep, and to let others fight over being the shepherds. It does not require your electorate to be educated. We are all too ready to surrender the responsibility of decision making to good orators, and sloganeering.

This seems overly pessimistic, looking at a broad historical context. Democracy, not totalitarianism, has spread through the world. Totalitarian states are hard to maintain, and do not seem to last. Far from being lazy, they require huge resource inputs to maintain. They are as fragile as they are oppressive. As Borges said of Nazi Germany, in the end, Hitler's was a dream you could die for, but not one you could live for. Sloganeering does not lead to enduring results.

If you believe in entropy, then unless there is a consistent effort to renew your democratic institutions, all roads lead to serfdom.

To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail? Hayek's prediction turned out to be fabulously wrong. (It remains a fascinating argument, but the evidence all points the other way.) Democracies seldom regress, once established, whereas dictatorships and totalitarian governments slowly die out. People do renew democracies. Welfare states have become less, not more, socialistic, let alone "serflike". (Indeed, the key to much Scandinavian re-distributive policy is that they *encourage* mobility and human capital development.)

It could all change. History is complicated. But that would be a hypothesis, not a law of physics.

-Jester