At least according to Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren.

To hear Senator Elizabeth Warren tell it, dynamic pricing is the biggest scam since Madoff. She has her war bonnet in a twist at the idea that brick-and-mortar retailers could do what e-commerce sellers have been doing for decades.

The trouble with her position is that all pricing in a free market economy is dynamic, as Hennessey pointed out in his article. Warren is pretending that she’s only talking about prices being changed in “real time,” but she carefully declines to specify what time frame constitutes “real time.”

The only time frame within which it would be wrong to change pricing, though, is between price agreement and delivery of the product to the specific purchaser, as illustrated in a couple of dumba** TV ads involving pizza delivery and hamburger joint ordering (even though the latter’s price changes occur before the customer makes his order).

Canceling dynamic pricing, though, is strongly consistent with the Senator’s socialist goal of government controlling production, which would give, also, control over pricing to government.

Next up: Warren comes out against dynamic pricing in the stock and bond markets. That’s the epitome of prices changing across traders, where one trader gets one price, and another trader gets another for the same product. That’s a fast-moving environment, though, where traders acting at different times, even measured in seconds, will get differing prices, and an environment (now slightly different from dynamic pricing per se) where traders offer different prices within the same bid-ask spread. Even in the stock and bond market, though, the agreed prices don’t change in the time between acceptance and fulfillment. But a freely operating stock or bond market (much less both) is anathema to a socialist.