You are absolutely right... on paper.
I find that one of the primary challenges of most ideologies is the assumption of a well-informed, intelligent and moral/ethical populace. Except... that's not how many humans operate. They want the quick and easy way, and if they can gain something without paying or without working... they will... generally leaving the "honest" participants in the system with the short end of the stick.
So we end up with these systems where "rules" and "freedom" become uneasy dance partners.
Just playing devil's advocate here-- don't really have any useful answers to offer, aside from exploring ways to make systems-- of all kinds-- "exploitation proof," from their onset... so only the appropriate and intended use of a system are compensated and all other uses and attempts to "game" the system earns you zero. But then we end up with the ethical dilemma of whether it is truly freedom if those who would game the system were NOT allowed to participate equally?
Very true. But -- it does leave us with a dilemma. If humans aren't very well-informed, intelligent or moral/ethical, isn't instituting human leaders and human rules the societal equivalent of a perpetual motion machine? A poorly informed, unintelligent and immoral/unethical populace runs themselves through a box called a voting booth, and ends up more intelligent, better informed and more moral and ethical? You end up with more than you started with?
To me, that makes no sense. I don't see laws as a way of "improving" society. Laws just give us a tool to use against the immoral and unethical.
But laws are not the only tool we have. I think that voluntarily allowing us to withdraw from interactions with the unethical or immoral, not binding us to group decisions made in conjunction with the unintelligent, and allowing us to choose a different course than the poorly informed is in general a better option than laws, because that allows the consequences of causality to be the teacher of these folks rather than us.