[holograham]

not to get into the nuances of how modern democracies work but thinking that politicians are constantly crowdsourcing the best ideas and using that information to guide them is an incredible naive view of how modern democracies (usually democratic republic with additional branches that contain a mixture of elected and appointed officials).

Politicians in a modern democracy do indeed need to stay elected but that is typically independent of what a true, unfettered democracy would produce. Some of this is by design -- a pure democracy would be largely unworkable. At best too fractured and at worst everyone would vote for more benefits and less (no) taxes at the expense of national debt for a future generation.

Mostly politicians vote for what keeps them in office. Which as we see in the US is typically special interest groups and powerful lobbists.

True crowdsourcing occurs in free market economies. We could go there :) The libertarian would say if high speed rail was so in demand and made such economic sense then why arent companies scrambling to take advantage of a market inefficiency to make gobs of money?