Are you trying to compare the amount of people that can distill moonshine or smuggle drugs to the amount of people capable of writing secure encryption software?

The effectiveness of limiting proliferation is tied directly to the difficulty and the scarcity of the human capital involved, this is why restricting the proliferation of small arms which can be build by anyone with some machining experience is near impossible, but limiting the proliferation of say nuclear arms and technology is quite possible.

It would surprise me if the NSA (or any other agency) doesn't have a list of all or most software engineers and mathematicians which are capable of designing crypto, that mailing list isn't that big.

You've missed the 2nd half of my post I see, I said that if any even half arsed measures are going to be in place the crackdown will become more effective with time. If you can stall or slow down the evolution of open encryption sufficiently so state actors can catch up then that's effectively makes that encryption useless. Today for example the NSA can break weak DSA configurations, and factor weak RSA keys in 2-3 years they'll gain other capabilities.

What will happen if say we do wake up to a post quantum world with much of our asymmetric cryptography being worthless. Do you really see people being able to develop a new RSA level family of algorithms at a hackaton?

If you can't increase the work that needed to be done to break your encryption at the same rate as your adversary increases their capabilities you are going to lose and lose badly.

And draconian measures and extreme costs is just what they are proposing, I'm not advocating that it's going to be effective at first or cheap, but dismissing it as even if they want too they will never be able too is just as foolish as voting for Trump ironically to give him a sympathy vote.

Go ask people from East Germany, pre-Glasnost Russia and even some countries that exist today how easy it is going to be to evade surveillance enmass.

You should never be dismissive of threats no matter how far fetched or unlikely they are or how incapable your opponent at executing them might be, this is probably one of the more important lessons one can take from history.

Hence 'download from Canada'.

Are you claiming that OpenBSD never had or has exploits that the NSA could or can use to access systems running it? Because if so that would be a heck of a lofty claim.