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.