I think it's incredibly rare that anyone legitimately believes that the government is intent on controlling people... The common belief, though, is that the government is less protective than they should be of individuals rights. Most western governments have peititoned directly against the sort of end to end encryption we see with WhatsApp - it prevents them from protecting us. That's not the same as generic website encryption, though, where the web server and client can see and decrypt all transmitted data (thus effectively giving both full visibility of the data).
I for one trust government a lot more than I probably should, but as much as I know that government is generally good, I know that they cannot protect me from capitalistic entities out to extract money. Obviously generic Facebook traffic is of minimal interest, but it never ends there. The reason people perform MITM attacks in coffee shops is to access credentials, which they go on to use for far more nefarious activities - usually some form of direct scam in friendship circles - one compromised Facebook account has the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of end users.
Encryption of web traffic is a tool which government could have stepped in and enforced years ago to prevent countless MITM attacks, but it ended up growing organically out of necessity. Government struggles to keep up with consumer technology because of how quickly it develops, that doesn't mean I don't trust them though.