What are all these politicians doing here? And how can we make them go away?

On Thursday my Sun Media colleague Anthony Furey said "If people entered politics for the right reasons" we'd have fewer scandals over greedy speaking fees, political coverups or outright corruption. Which is true.

And he wished people would enter politics because, while leading a normal life, they'd notice "a handful of policies out there that need to be changed", seek office, stay long enough to fix those few specific things, then leave.

It's a noble ideal and a venerable one.

The Romans especially admired Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, an aristocrat of austerely simple tastes summoned from his small farm to save Rome from invasion by becoming dictator, after which he immediately resigned and returned to his plough just 16 days later. And the American Society of the Cincinnati, founded in 1783 to preserve the ideals and comradeship of Revolutionary War officers, honoured his memory and gave a major city its name.

Us? Not so much. By our actions, specifically our voting, we endorse the concept of the lifetime politician: Reading Hansard as a teen, entering student politics, becoming a brash, vehemently partisan aide then climbing the greasy pole from municipal to provincial to federal politics, staying for decades and voting themselves a fat pension.

Anthony further argued, "These days, people enter politics for no good reason and thus never leave because they had no goals in the first place."

And he's half-right: Far too many are drawn into politics for purely bad reasons, from ego to deviousness.

On his second point, I have some quibbles.

In many cases they never leave the broader public sphere not for lack of goals but lack of socially useful skills. Even such alleged luminaries as Joe Clark, Bob Rae or George Smitherman, are (how shall I put this delicately?) legends in their own minds unlikely to flourish in a more, uh, results-oriented environment.

Another reason they stay indefinitely is that the one goal they do have, vacuous "change" without motive or direction, is self-devouring and, hence, self-perpetuating. No matter what you change, there's always something else to mess with.

For that matter, whatever you yourself did, that was good, exciting, visionary change yesterday, immediately becomes the stodgy boring status quo just begging for some agent of change to come and change it. Pick up any administration budget and you'll find dozens of pages of exciting new changes, even if they've been in power for nearly a decade.

Politicians succumb to this, and get away with it, because of its prevalence in the larger society.

Typically, the otherwise praiseworthy 2013 Google Science Fair has the postmodern slogan "It's your turn to change the world" as though it were about you and "change" in the abstract rather than creating, or preserving, something good on its own terms.

And I once heard a Clerk of the Privy Council (head of the federal civil service) say he was looking to hire 150 "change agents" a year.

If taken seriously this goal would mean hiring 1,500 in a decade. And if each one changed, say, three things a year (if not they're not really agents) we'd get 4,500 major changes a year and 45,000 in a decade.

That sounds like chaos not the Just Society.

And what about identifying things worth keeping and protecting them? Like, say, due process? Instead it's all changely changehoodship and there's literally no end to it.

It's like that Escher staircase that goes up and up yet forms a closed loop. And round and round the career politicians go, year after year, enjoying fat salaries and pensions, high status and the thunderous applause of their own egos and staff.

Going nowhere ... and loving it.