Governor Jerry Brown plumbs to a depth of at least six feet under the ground. He has proven his indifference to the sanctity of life in end-of-life issues by signing an assisted suicide bill into law and then vetoing a bill that would allow terminally ill patients to access clinically proven yet FDA-unapproved experimental drugs. In a sense, he has to. The ecology of the Post-modern Welfare State requires this.

It gets to the lifecycle of a human being in the Welfare State. In the first stage of life, a young person has potential and can be educated to do great things. An adult can be a producer and then at peak career performance a tax mine. An older person is a financial and resource burden. The older a population gets, the more expensive they become to carry and the less they produce to refill the coffers. For the state, suicide is palliative and relieves the nagging aches and pains that attack towards the end of life.

So Jerry Brown made a hard, stubby-pencil decision and made the numbers balance for the State of California. Greater access to euthanasia means another resource sink gets plugged and more goodies for the rest of us. Greater access to life-saving drugs for the terminally ill prolongs their lives. It keeps their account open. It keeps a generous state on the hook for their unending litany of medical bills. So Jerry did the math. It guided him to judicious use of his veto pen.

This logic is morally sickening if you are not a Dialectical Materialist. It angers, shocks and outrages people who value the sacred dimension of life. Jerry Brown and the Materialists don’t believe that dimension truly exists. Silly God-talk doesn’t let him get on with the grim and macabre work of the state. He has a machine to keep stoked and ways and means that demand his attendance.

Nietzsche asks a hard question of Jerry Brown’s ideological forerunners in his work The Gay Science

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

In the absence of a living God, we now are in the thrall of Materialist Values. Your life matters, if you can afford it. Or, in the Postmodern State, your life matters if it still is deemed necessary. Those who deem it so or withhold the sanction to permit the continuance thereof are no longer informed by the decent morality of the practicing Christian. Your life, in accordance with the Post-modern hubris of Materialistic philosophy, is now measured in utils. That is indeed the dark side of Governor Moonbeam.