Freedom is an interesting philosophical topic. How can a restriction make you more free? Well if you drink the FSF GPL Richard Stallman branded Kool Aid, you might "get it", but I sure don't.
I don't want the freedom from doing things, I want to the freedom to do things.
That said, strictness and protection and safety of some language features is something some people would like to rely on.
I think operator overloading in C++ was a huge freaking mistake for instance. You can look at two piece of code without going through some contextual learning to find out what the hell "+" was just redefined to do, and I think that's crappy.
Other languages get by some how without operator overloading. And often without a loss of expressiveness.
That said, judicious use, and education about how subsystems in software work is a necessity even in the presence and absence of things people might consider to be abominations, like operator overloading :-)
