To Have and to Want Not

The pangrammatical analogue of doing what you want is seeing what you have. Sometimes one worries that it is the role of the State to keep people from doing what they want and seeing what they have. Thereafter "business" takes over. Managers get people to do things they don't want to do, while advertisers show them things they don't have.

Where did the presumption come from that it would be madness to let people do what they want? (The idea that if individuals did what they wanted the results would be undesirable for society.) And how does this relate to the practice of keeping people from seeing what they have?