2cts:
I don't know how it works where you live, but here (in France) with public healthcare the government will have to pay your medical bills after you get an accident
Or maybe there should be an exception ? "if you crash without helmet, you won't have healthcare. Take your responsibility"

Same with cars : you are adult enough to decide if you want to buckle up, but the whole community will pay for your "adultness" once you end in a wheelchair...

Wasn't there a similar debate with football a few months ago ? players get more long term injuries because they have an armor and feel safer, dress them as rugby players and they will reach 70.

Don't know for average Joes in US, but here in France the week after they put the "3 strikes and you're out" laws in place, everyone was subscribing to VPN or Usenet services.
They start monitoring: everyone goes deeper to avoid detection. They then lose all kind of control/visibility they might have had before.
A bit like what is described here :http://wikileaks.org/wiki/An_insight_into_child_porn

Then you get to see fake VPN services, built by labels/movie studios. Not to mention those created by mafia groups to harvest private data...

So, SOPA (or whatever name your local government uses) might provide more control/visibility, but not for a long time.
What's next ? We'll be required to install a mandatory government spyware on our endpoints to be allowed access to the Internet ?

Well, part of what you're describing can be bought today.
Appliances from Palo Alto Networks do just that : User awareness, L7 identification (even in SSL) so that allowing TCP 80 or 443 doesn't mean allowing everything, ...

They still lack many things from Checkpoint/Juniper/Cisco (PBR or IPSec aren't fully there yet IMHO) but they're quite impressive.
On some tests I did, it was able to see random encrypted UDP P2P packets as "Bittorrent". Not to mention that many webapps are seen as protocols (gmail, gmail chat, mail.ru, yahoo finance, etc...)

Kinda weird to define security policies by user|group/application instead of IP/port. (you can still do that if it makes you feel more comfortable: use RFC ports or self-defined ports)

Sexy HW architecture with FPGAs and dedicated CPUs for each tasks, nice web interface with reporting: it's a real gap from a typical appliance firewall, but it costs an arm and a leg...