I think most people use the concept of being for or against "Freedom" to refer to the opposite sides of the bottom-up versus top-down modes of economic development and governance.
Certainly, it's an over-generalization, and the word freedom is used specifically to evoke an emotional response, but I don't think it's devoid of meaning.
An unfortunate side-effect of having a democracy with 300 million plus people in it, is that to a certain extent these sort of over-generalizations are a necessary part of coalition building.
Not sure what you mean by a bottom up government but the buzzwords are flowing I'm assuming it involves something along the lines of privatizating everything.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” – Alexis de Tocqueville