My answer to your last question is slowly marching toward feudalism. It's distressing to see how things have gotten worse over the last 30 years. I remember in the 90s that protest leaders were arrested preemptively before an international meeting in Washington D. C. No one had committed a crime but the powers that be could not suffer the complaints of the people. In the last decade protest leaders were preemptively on faux terrorism charges.
When being slowly boiled it is hard to recognize when the point of no return had occurred.
Once the new principle has been established, however, then the system can slowly clamp down until more and more people are involved -- all without any political input at all. So that's how we end up in a security state and there really isn't anybody accountable for how we got here. Lots of little changes around the edges.
We've ended up in a spot where, if you ask a constitutional scholar, they can explain to you how it all works and makes sense. But if you ask the average guy on the street, he'll tell you the system is spinning out of control. There's a serious structural problem when the system has become so byzantine that it requires 6 years of study to understand it all. And most of those guys don't believe that it is fair or correct. We seem to have been overwhelmed by edge cases.
One of the sadder parts of a credit crisis like we're having is that privileged players, mostly the government and some Credit Card companies, are angling for more "aggressive" collection abilities.
Let's be honest, if you get yourself 50-100K in debt with a student loan and you're not making that much, you are in prison. You'll never receive a tax refund, you won't be able to own property, you can't have brokerage accounts even with a 2-3K in them for a rainy day, and so on.
There's an equal or greater number of folks who are just as screwed with various taxes. The government is now talking about preventing people with back taxes from travelling overseas. Look for folks to start talking about stuff like this for the students as well.
This is very dark stuff. Even considering all of our freedoms that are getting trampled by the TSA and other agencies, this idea that we are allowing people to be indebted for life without any recourse simply because they have some sort of "special" debt is a terrible new thing for the U.S. I actually think it's worse than the horrific civil liberties problem we have. People will get used to having no anonymity and being tracked like a wild animal on a nature show (sadly), but they'll never get used to being an indentured servant.
When the United States was formed we made a conscious decision that you didn't punish people for life for poor money choices they made. We didn't have debtor's prisons. What the the hell are we doing to ourselves?