Food, gambling, etc. are all backed by hordes of brilliant well paid people trying to get you to ruin your life so they make money. On the other side is just regular people like us stressed out trying to survive.
This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry and I think "we the people" need protection from these forces
There is one and only one limit on freedom which I believe in: when one individual (or group) begins to infringe the freedoms of others.
The problem which I see in a lot of ideologies which purport to value freedom, is a naive idea that government is the only organization which can infringe on individual freedoms, and this is blatantly and obviously false. Corporations and religious organizations can and do infringe individual freedoms all the time, and a society which fails to address this problem becomes less and less free as these organizations become the de-facto oligarchy.
We don't need to set aside our belief in freedom to fight against these organizations, and I think when we do that, we're making a huge concession we don't need to make. Casinos and advertisers manipulating people to take their money and provide little value in return absolutely is a freedom issue: casinos and advertisers are manipulating us to give up the freedoms money allows us. When we make concessions like,
> This isn't some "freedom" issue
I think we lose a lot of the people who care about freedom, when we could be explaining to those people how these companies infringe their freedoms.