By L.P. LUPO

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Left-wing columnist Michael Kinsley has ordered Democrats to stop expressing lukewarm things about capitalism in the wake of economist Milton Friedman’s death last week, because, according to Kinsley, capitalism is a fraud.

Kinsley, a Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar, says capitalism is a “swindle” and the stock market is a “fraud on the public.”

Whew. A Harvard education is not what it once was. Neither is a Rhodes scholarship.

Kinsley should first inform those who oversee Harvard’s endowment of his discovery. He then should demand that they take the endowment’s $29.2 billion out of the stock market and put $100 million under each mattress of the university’s 3,000 undergraduates until they can return the $25 billion their endowment has “fraudulently” earned since 1990.

Class-action lawyers, take note.

Kinsley has discovered — horror of horrors — that things are worth different amounts to different people at different times.

Exhibit A for his fraudulent capitalism/stock market claim is that private investors sometimes buy companies at a premium over its share value, taken private and later — “at the blink of an eye” — resold to another company or the public at a profit.

Capitalist Swindle. There ought to be a law.

That law might bar other evil capitalist swindles: buying a house, fixing it up and reselling it at a profit or the flipping of screenplays by Hollywood literary agents. There is no end to such swindles.

Kinsley, who generally hews close to the talking points of the left, is on to something.

But he might have done us a favor by disclosing his shocking discovery and remedy before the election earlier this month.

We should have known to expect legislation that requires holding periods before baseball cards can be resold or traded, while the government determines whether one Alfonso Soriano card is truly worth two Hideki Matsui cards. Or is it the other way around?

Kinsley asks which price: (a) the stock market price formerly in the pages of now dying newspapers like his; (b) the private offering price or; (c) the later sale or IPO price is the “true capitalist price. Anyone? Anyone?” Boy, that is really a tough one.

The answer is: (d) all of the above. Nobody put a gun to anyone’s head to fork over the money for the share at either end.

Even if the short-term price differences were irrational, that still would be no cause for the over-the-top “capitalism/swindle” charge. By that logic, the Jayson Blair scandal with the New York Times is cause to conclude that free speech is a fraud.

How long must I wait before I can trade my one Friedman obituary for the left’s 29.2 billion fawning obituaries on John Kenneth Galbraith? Is that a sufficient number of obits on JKG?

Kinsley, please call me with your answer after your remedial course in 21^st-century post-communist economics course.

Or try George Mason University. It is nearby, has a good basketball team and has two Nobel prize-winning economists.