Talking about "choice" in abstraction, outside the social-institutional context, is pretty meaningless. It is like talking about "friction" - it can be a bad thing when it causes wear and tear of the engine or the gearbox, but it is a necessary thing when the 'rubber meets the road' (try driving on ice). The same pertains to choice.
In the free market system theory, choice is good not in itself but because it is the key and only mechanism that optimizes utility in that system (which is a good thing). That choice is furthermore institutionally constrained to commodities that are excludable and rival - meaning that it is possible to exclude non-payers from enjoying the utility of that commodity and the exercise of that utility by one user rivals (or diminishes) the utility obtainable by other users.
Whether those conditions are empirically attainable and sufficient to make the choice work its wonders in the marketplace is another issue - but at lest this argument places the concept of choice in a coherent context allowing to determine whether choice is good or bad. That is to say, choice applied to non-excludable goods is actually bad because it creates the free rider problem and reduces utility instead of optimizing it.
An example is the road system in the US - it is to a large extent a non-excludable and non-rival good i.e. anyone with a car can enter it and one person's using it does not diminish another person's utility, at least under certain conditions. That encourages indiscriminate use which results in congestion, increased risk, etc. - which has the effect of excluding some potential users and diminishing the utility to other users. In that situation, converting roads to excludable commodity by implementing tolls that vary according to the demand (which are barriers to choice) creates the situation when choice can actually work its wonders as advertised, assuming certain level of elasticity or consumer responsiveness to price fluctuations. Of course, that elasticity depends, in turn, on the availability of alternative modes of transportation (choice again), which is an outcome of a given political-institutional makeup.
This discussion shows that even in the neo-classical discourse the capacity to choose is placed in a certain institutional context that decides whether it produces utility or disutility (i.e. whether it is good or bad). An argument can also be made that planned economies were erected to minimize the disutility of choice under a free-market condition e.g. food price gauging caused by a transfer of substantial labor force from agriculture to industry - followed by another argument that once the initial stage of industrialization (creating the means of production) has been achieved, these restrictions on choice lost their utility.
In sum, choice can be good or bad, depending on place, time, and social-economic conditions. However, in the propaganda babble that cheer-leads the status quo in the United States, "choice" becomes a fetish that not only is always good , but also an empty concept that denotes anything the writer wants it to mean, or nothing in particular. "Choice" (or "freedom") is simply a code word for "Amerika the beautiful."
Thus, if we have 50 brands of toilet paper on a supermarket shelf - that exemplifies "choice" - but that we have only two political parties (one party per 140 million population) is also, we are told, a result of voter's "choice." We are also told that we can choose any mode of ground transportation as long as it is a car (not necessarily black anymore), that we can choose not to live next to people of different ethnic origins and surround ourselves with the suburban monotonous uniformity, and that we can choose to leave this country if we do not like what corporate bosses, developers and their lackeys in the government are dishing out to us. Blah, blah, blah....
Making a distinction between this propaganda drivel and the concept of choice that has an empirical meaning and consequences contingent on social-institutional ramifications is necessary to have any meaningful discussion on the subject.
Wojtek