Imagine that every major research university runs a full node. If you were this "scary, monolithic government" that you seem to fear, how would you go about controlling the software that scientists are running in their cryptocurrency labs? I'm sure you could introduce several rouge nodes, but that wouldn't matter. You have to control them all.
For a lot of things only control over 50% (or perhaps less) of the hash rate is needed. That's only a fraction of the fraction of the 1000 nodes that are mining.