[Joker_vD]

> should I, the consumer, be able to choose what I want to do

There is a whole field dedicated to engineering choices of individual humans, it's called "marketing". Oh, and also "recruitment". The choices are entirely yours, sure, and yet they're still malleable and largely predictable. I bet there is even statistics "such% of population is susceptible to this tactics, and such% of population is susceptible to that trick, and there is this negligible % of those who pretty much can't be swayed in a reliable way, but they don't matter (too few of them)".

The thing is, government prohibition is just one of the least effective methods, but it is also the laziest and easiest and most obvious one which is why people come up with it all the time.