Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Actually, there are three, I think, reasonable reasons we might restrict choice in, as you say, a country that values freedom so highly. One is where the individual making the choice is really not capable of fully evaluating the consequences of their decisions. And this usually applies to young people. So we put restrictions on what young people can buy because their brains haven't fully developed to be able to evaluate that. I think most people would agree with that. Secondly, we sometimes put restrictions on people's activities when what they do may adversely affect other people. The biggest examples here would be smoking in public places, also restrictions on alcohol consumption if you're going to drive afterward, the idea being that if you are under the influence of alcohol and drive, you may have a crash and hurt other people besides yourself. The third one, I think, is perhaps more controversial. And this is when the playing field between the parties engaged in the trade - the business and the consumer - isn't level. And usually this means that the business knows a lot more about the product or service than the consumer. And you can never hope to bring the consumer up to the same level as the business. So oftentimes, we'll see restrictions here, and these usually apply to the business. And these are usually in the areas of things like health and finance."