Not everyone believes in that, but I personally accept "we have a top-level view, we see clearly the stupid things you're doing that you can't see yourself" as a valid reason.
> Why can't it be that they're making the choices they want to make?
Just because they want to make a choice, doesn't mean it's not stupid-ass choice. One could argue for the right to be stupid, but I draw the line at the point where stupidity becomes an externality.
Take gasoline. Of course cheap fuel seems like it's in my best interest because it means I pay less for travel. Still, I want the carbon tax badly because I understand that if we don't start accounting for the emissions, we're going to cook the planet in few decades.
Or a different example - traffic lights and signs. People bitch about the timings all the time because they see a red light often when driving through their area, without stopping to consider that they're being optimized to give optimal traffic throughout half of the city.