I'd like to point out a few weaknesses in the Auschwitz example:
1. 'the nazis' are definitively others -- "they're not like us" -- which
gives the student an escape hatch.
2. the nazis were presumably 'undone' both by the barbaric irrationality of
their ideology and by the forces of good ('us'). There is a smug hint of
inevitability to this story of defeat.
3. the example is a variation on the theme of "graduating", as in graduating
from smoking marijuana to mainlining heroin. Maximizing utility doesn't
inevitably lead to genocide. Nor does neo-classical economics inevitably
lead to a apology for genocide.
This is not to dispute that there is a totalitarian logic to neo-classical
economics, only to point out that Auschwitz example probably gives more
grounds (subjectively) for dismissing the danger of that totalitarianism
than for attending to it.
I'd propose muzak as a better metaphor than Auschwitz for *most*
neo-classical analysis. Most articles published in academic journals has
been produced primarily for the purpose of career advancement, not the
advancement of knowledge. The selection of this material by "peer review" is
largely dictated by conformism, not by any genuinely rigourous intellectual
criteria -- although typically that conformism is communicated as
"scholarly" ("I am a scholar, therefore if I don't like the argument it is
'unscholarly'").
What you get then is not some inexorable totalitarian argument leading from
the market to the gas chamber, but a soppy mush of sycophantic string music
that acts as recorded background for the arbitrary and seemingly
uncontestable exercise of power.
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
