I find that one of the primary challenges of most ideologies is the assumption of a well-informed, intelligent and moral/ethical populace. Except... that's not how many humans operate.

Very true. But -- it does leave us with a dilemma. If humans aren't very well-informed, intelligent or moral/ethical, isn't instituting human leaders and human rules the societal equivalent of a perpetual motion machine? A poorly informed, unintelligent and immoral/unethical populace runs themselves through a box called a voting booth, and ends up more intelligent, better informed and more moral and ethical? You end up with more than you started with?

To me, that makes no sense. I don't see laws as a way of "improving" society. Laws just give us a tool to use against the immoral and unethical.

But laws are not the only tool we have. I think that voluntarily allowing us to withdraw from interactions with the unethical or immoral, not binding us to group decisions made in conjunction with the unintelligent, and allowing us to choose a different course than the poorly informed is in general a better option than laws, because that allows the consequences of causality to be the teacher of these folks rather than us.