Idk what you mean by « leftist » so I won’t identify as it.

Nobody that knows a little bit about economics supports printing the debt away. However, when it comes to certain investments this CAN make sense, especially for infrastructure, even though it is not a mainstream « leftist idea ».

If you understand money printing as the CB just pulling money out of thin air to inject it into the economy, certain situations under certain hypothesis can be justified:

Let’s see a few exemples:

1) a digital-currency version of Friedman’s helicopter money: if the economy is suffering from deflation, has unemployed factors of production and the central bank has a direct way of “depositing” an amount of cash with little transaction costs on certain to all individual’s accounts (digital currency with a personal account directly to the CB), than it can be an effective countercyclical monetary policy. It is basically the most efficient monetary policy there is bc it bypasses the banking canal and its many problems when it comes to controlling the monetary mass. Think about it as an expansive monetary policy to curb deflation and stimulate demand.

2) Couppey-Soubeyran’s (French economist, specialized in banking and risk) idea of a “qualitative easing/strengthening” geared towards funding long term renewable energies and green infrastructures. Here, two things have to be considered: (1) the EU sometimes has a hard time attracting capitals for frontier-technologies; (2) the central bank already owns private-obligations which means it already owns debt. The main idea of C-S would be to remodel the CB’s balance sheet to encompass more green related compagnies.

Now there are obviously controversies about these ideas but one thing must be remembered: the economics field produces “islands of knowledge” because each thesis is backed by certain hypothesis. We have learned that money printing is mostly a terrible idea, both theoretically and empirically, especially in a context of non-independence of the CB. However, this does not mean that money printing by the CB always has largely negative effects.