The folks over at The Corner are debating the merits of phasing out the penny (there are several posts–just scroll down or control-F for “penn”).

Most seem to favor keeping it, and make all kinds of arguments for it, few of which I find compelling, and most of which are, in my humble opinion, at base a simple conservative resistance to change, them being conservatives and all. One last holdout was Peter Robinson, who was swayed to the pro-penny side by the following flawed argument:

A penny is to money as entropy is to thermodynamics. When you spend money, you get some useful work (the stuff you bought), some useful left over energy (large change), and some energy lost to entropy (pennies). Sure, if you get enough pennies together, you can make most of them useful, but some will always be lost to the pavement, cracks between the cushions, and not having quite enough to fill a roll of pennies.

Just as you can’t get rid of entropy in thermodynamics, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to get rid of fiscal entropy; the most you can do is turn nickels into the new unit of entropy.

Sorry, I don’t find the “entropy” argument compelling. If it were true, then if a hundred to the dollar is good, a thousand to the dollar would be better. Why stop there?

Face it, any choice of the smallest denomination of currency is going to be arbitrary. While it would be nice to see some deflation a la Ramesh, it’s a dangerous path to get there, and at the current valuation of the dollar, pennies really are useless.

I’d say that a reasonable criterion for when a coin has too small a value is when it’s not possible to purchase anything with a single one of it. A penny may still buy thoughts, but there’s nothing else that it can purchase in today’s society, since the demise of the penny gumball machine.

Away with it.