I would not recommend using a default scope on an ActiveRecord model for sorting.
Start your Rails console and try Model.find(1). This will result into: SELECT models.* FROM models WHERE
models.id=1 ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1
This ORDER BY will be included in every unneccessary query. The above query will be slower in MySQL than without the ORDER BY clause. Try it yourself!
Create a normal scope and include it with every query where you expect more than 1 record as a result.
In case you consider a mixin try
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Concern.html