It costs a nonzero amount to get a certificate at all, and a self-signed certificate is barely better than raw http.

Well, the question was about encryption rather than trust. Trust is a whole different topic. Nobody has yet come up with a good trust model for the public Internet. The one that exists right now is next to worthless for two reasons: 1) Criminals who exploit novice Internet users never bother with using SSL on their phishing sites 2) greater than 99% of all Internet users who encounter an SSL certificate problem simply click "Okay, proceed" without bothering to understand what the warning is trying to tell them. In terms of trust alone, SSL on the public Internet is as bad or worse as any security theatre you'll find in an airport.

A self-signed certificate, however, gets you encryption without trust. That in itself is valuable to someone like me. It's incredibly unlikely that anyone would want to target me specifically to pose as my email/web server. I'm mainly concerned about preventing eavesdroppers from picking up the contents of my traffic by sniffing the wifi or compromising a router along the way. And if they did, the chances are pretty high that I would be trying to access my server using a client that already has the certificate saved, so I would likely be warned if the certificate changed in any way.

Finally, a lot of people fail to realize that there are plenty of situations where you can have both encryption and relative trust without needing the services of a public certificate authority. Anyone can set up their own CA and distribute the root certificate to all computers and devices that need them. This works fine for a corporate intranet or VPN, for example.

In fact, in Germany the liberal FDP is usually seen as close to the conservative CDU/CSU. The opposite are the pseudo-left SPD (initially a worker's party, nowadays just as populist as the CDU/CSU) and Die Linke (literally "the left one") with the Greens being closer to the SPD than the CDU/CSU.

"Liberal" and "leftist" are fairly orthogonal in Germany, with the (pseudo-)leftist parties wanting to add laws that protect the workers, the conservatives wanting laws that allow them to hunt terrorists in our bedrooms and the liberals wanting laws that give big tax breaks to corporations.

"Big government" is something all the big parties like as they traditionally divide themselves over "on the employees' side" and "on the employers' side" - even though they've since both changed to "on the side where we make lots of money" (as evidenced when the SPD's left wing left the party and joined forces with the successor of the GDR's Socialist Union Party to form Die Linke).