Think back to Keynes' analogy of the government burying bags of money in a mine shaft. His point was that meaningless make-work is no different than what happens under the gold standard with no government intervention. As the value of gold rises relative to the dollar more effort is devoted to digging it out of the ground.
The absurdity of the example is intended to illustrate the absurdity of doing nothing. The point of the analogy is to recognize that creating money to accomplish socially useful tasks is better than either burying money in mine shafts or expecting the private market to deflate or dig up more gold. This is what monetarism is supposed to accomplish by lowering interest rates and why Milton Friedman famously stated that "we are all Keynesians now."
If it were a practical objection with the pennies I suppose one could answer it by adding another slot that converted 95 pennies into single dollar bills every five minutes. :)
"In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, no one is a Keynesian any longer.... we all use the Keynesian language and apparatus; none of us any longer accepts the initial Keynesian conclusions" (Friedman 1968).
The absurdity of the example is intended to illustrate the absurdity of doing nothing. The point of the analogy is to recognize that creating money to accomplish socially useful tasks is better than either burying money in mine shafts or expecting the private market to deflate or dig up more gold. This is what monetarism is supposed to accomplish by lowering interest rates and why Milton Friedman famously stated that "we are all Keynesians now."
If it were a practical objection with the pennies I suppose one could answer it by adding another slot that converted 95 pennies into single dollar bills every five minutes. :)