The "sheep" approach makes some things much more gameable. Lobbyists could just find people with lots of followers and bribe them (whether outright or more subtly). You could say this happens already and your proposal just makes it more efficient; true, but that's by design. It's supposed to be hard to change the nation's mind. It's supposed to be difficult to turn money into votes. I also worry that this proposal disenfranchises those who are too stupid to use the system optimally; presumably we have good reasons for wanting to live in a democracy rather than a singapore-esque technocracy.
Capitalism: Haven't we already reached the point where we should shift to the left? I mean, it's a continuum, not a discrete jump, but it seems to me that a nation as wealthy as ours has already hit the point where policies like nationalized healthcare, subsidized public transit and a high minimum wage are worth it. (Honestly I suspect most politicians agree with your core point that countries should start on the right and gradually move to the left as they get richer - my view is that there's actually quite a lot of consensus in politics, but we argue about the parts we do differ on, because there's no point arguing where there's already a consensus. So the discussion is not about whether the basic principle is true or not, but about how fast we should be moving to the left right now).
Smart vs dumb: Well, smart policies are smart and dumb policies are dumb, sure. But there are real, extrinsic differences between what government can do (enforce cooperation, avoid negative equilibria, account for some kinds of externalities, function effectively in natural monopolies) and what private industry or individuals can do (eliminate inefficiencies in competitive markets, respond rapidly to change, give minority viewpoints a chance to prove themselves) ; it's legitimate to say that certain industries or services can be more effectively run by one or the other and certain kinds of decisions should be taken by one or the other, and it's legitimate to disagree as a matter of policy over where exactly the line is.
So the discussion is not about whether the basic principle is true or not
Huh? From a normative point of view I see no reasons why poor countries should be "more on the right" and wealthy countries should be "more on the left".
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: