[slx26]

These are all very interesting thoughts, including the comment you are responding too. I just want to make the situation even more tricky and point out that freedom is not only about the amount of choices you have available, so giving something away to get more choices is not always positive. There's a bound on complexity, and it turns out that freedom requires "space" to decide, not only "availability" of choices. Rules and restrictions, even if implicit (unspoken rules, cultural expectations, etc.), do reduce our freedom by reducing our space to decide, pressuring us in some ways.

EDIT: in any case, beyond a fairly low minimum, freedom is usually not so much about raw number of choices as it is about relative number of choices, comparing what options others have access to and what options do we have access to. So I think we should focus and work more towards "healthy freedom ranges" and freedom equality and coverage (not leaving some people out) than pretending that any single change increases or reduces our freedom in a dramatic fixed amount. To me, the freedom scale is clearly not linear. (Now I'm not even so sure "freedom" is the right word to focus on. It's more about "unobstructed human potential" than about "possibilities" to me.)