Predictably, Bernanke’s statements miffed some veterans groups. Fred Wellman, 22-year Army veteran and CEO of veteran-advocacy group ScoutComms commented to Foreign Policy, “I am not sure where Mr. Bernanke got his information, but the current numbers just don’t reflect saying military service does not help you succeed in the private sector. The most current surveys show that veterans are far more likely to be employed than non-veterans and earn higher median incomes in those jobs.” Robert L. Gordon III, retired Army colonel and current head of the veteran-advocacy group Got Your 6, wrote in the Huffington Post that Bernanke’s statements add to the misconception that veterans are “broken heroes,” a myth belied by the fact that veterans “vote, volunteer, and help [their] neighbors” at higher rates than their civilian counterparts. Gordon also pointed out that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment among all veterans over 18 is actually lower than the national average. (The discrepancy here is explained by the fact that Bernanke's numbers measure unemployment for post-9/11 veterans, whereas Wellman and Gordon are referring to all veterans, including those who served in Vietnam and World War II.)

The back and forth with facts and figures is interesting, but one can’t help but feel that something fundamental is missing from the conversation. The military isn’t solely a jobs program, or a jobs-training program, and for many it is that disconnect from the marketplace that is the strength and appeal of military service.

This was certainly the case in my own experience enlisting as an infantry soldier in the Army, though it wasn’t until after I separated from the military that I really was able to fully suss out the reasons I had joined. When friends would ask why I joined, I would usually struggle to come up with a response that they would understand, whether it was a family history of service or the GI Bill, before eventually asking a question of my own: “Would your coworkers die for you?” Intense, to be sure, but the question illuminates the different mental and moral frameworks we were operating under. I joined the infantry specifically because I wanted a role in the military that didn’t have a civilian counterpart (unlike, say, becoming a medic or cook) precisely because I wanted to experience the intensity of purpose and camaraderie that simply doesn’t exist within the framework of our civilian economy. I wanted to serve my country, but I wanted to serve it in a way that placed me outside the rationale of neoliberal consumerism.

CUNY Anthropology and Geography professor David Harvey, perhaps the preeminent scholar of neoliberalism today, describes our current socio-economic system in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism as “in short, the financialization of everything.” Under the pretext of advancing the cause of individual freedom, market forces spread and commodify—or transform goods and services into salable items—in an effort to expand the market. The concrete examples that spring to mind are for-profit prisons, hospitals, and schools. But the process is sophisticated enough to incorporate all sorts of things not traditionally adorned with “For Sale” signs. Companies have attempted to patent—and in some cases succeeded—things like seeds, human genetic material, and the human genome in the last decade. Product placement in movies, and its Fourth Estate equivalent of sponsored content, has blurred the line between art and commercials, journalism and advertising. Even our relationships, mitigated through the marketized filter of dating aps or online services, have been commodified. As Michael J. Sandel wrote for The Atlantic in 2012, “Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.”