have a choice about. A person doesn't have a choice in who their parents are or how they were raised or whether their family was rich or poor. A person doesn't have a choice about getting older, it just happens. A person doesn't have a choice about what their IQ is, or whether they suffer a mental illness, or whether they're ugly or good-looking or tall or short. They can only make choices within those boundaries.Ā
But scratch a little further and choice is more complicated. If someone is obese, is that a choice? Generally, people have a choice about what they eat and how much exercise they do, how informed they are about nutrition and so on. But genetics is important, and maybe (science is just starting to figure this out) the individual biome - everyone has gut bacteria, but different people have different gut bacteria and that affects digestion, which affects weight gain. At best, it's a mix of factors you control and factors you can't.
And go a little further and choice is even more complicated. People aren't very good at long term thinking or probability. Ask a teenager if it's a good idea to smoke, have a fast food diet and save nothing for retirement and ask that same person 45 years later if they made the right choices. Many people feel safer with a gun in the house because they feel they can use it to deal with a threat, even though statistically the gun is more likely to cause harm through an accident or through domestic violence or through suicide.
And then you can look at how individual decision-making is studied, and how that study is used to influence individual behaviour. Companies and marketers study it to sell more of their products and services, governments do the same to help achieve their desired social outcomes. Some companies are so good at it that they can tell, say, whether a customer is pregnant by the products she buys, before the customer even knows she is pregnant. If a company like Amazon or Wal-Mart can predict what you're going to buy before you buy it, how much choice do you really have?
And then you have to add up all the individual choices and see how they work as a system. Because individual choices are flawed, systems based wholly in individual outcomes are flawed too. You end up with unfairness of opportunity, inequality, a lack of social mobility, market power over consumer power, etc - and in turn those lead to poverty, poor health outcomes, inequality and a rentier class, lack of trust in the system, social instability...
So choice? Very important, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
Liberalism - or liberalism as it is today - basically evolved from the liberalism espoused by people like Adam Smith by recognising the limitations of liberal economic theory - the economics of individual choice - that are made obvious through real world results, and trying to address those problems. It's not about free healthcare at the point of a gun, but "a system based on individual choice has these flaws, so we should fix those parts of the system to make it work better". You're seeing liberals as "people who want to take something from me" when really they're "people who want to make the pie bigger and share the gains more equally"
(Of course those liberal theories, starting with Keynes, have their own flaws and their own real world problems, which is why we got Milton Friedman and neo-classical economic theory, and the flaws of Friedmanism and Austrian economics and the Chicago school are why today we have Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz)