What happens if there are no transactions in a block? What happens if there are no transactions in a block?  Suppose there is a 10 minute time frame  in the middle of the night, maybe on a holiday, and there are no transactions made.  Do the miners get paid 50 bitcoins for processing a zero?
The mining reward must be collected with a transaction, so technically there is at least one transaction in each block. 

The mining reward was designed to enable the initial distribution of bitcoins and to encourage the creation of a powerful bitcoin network with a lot of computers to support it, therefore it makes perfect sense that a miner gets the block mining reward regardless of how many transactions were included.