I wish I could print money.

I know exactly what I’d do with it: buy the original copy of “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.”

Because it turns out that Benjamin Franklin did, in fact, print money.

He was authorized to do so by the Pennsylvania legislature. I’m not. Apparently, that distinction matters.

Being perpetually behind on funds (which makes sense: printing cash doesn’t mean you get to keep it), Franklin had to scrimp.

“In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman,” he noted, “I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary. I drest plainly; I was seen at no places of idle diversion. I never went out a fishing or shooting.”

It must be my “idle diversions” that have kept me from becoming a millionaire. But if I didn’t have idle diversions, you wouldn’t be reading this column, and I’d be… wait a minute…

Franklin’s old master, Samuel Keimer, soon ran out of funds and moved to Barbados. So did the........

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