Enhanced flexibility has the advantage of enabling market economies to adjust automatically and not having to rest on policymakers' initiatives, which often come too late or are misguided. Such views, which echo Jean Baptiste Say in some ways, clearly have been paramount in a renewed twenty-first century appreciation of Adam Smith's contributions.
*** Classical economics, especially as refined and formalized by Ricardo and Alfred Marshall, emphasized competition in the marketplace among economic participants governed by rational selfinterest.8 The value preferences of these participants would be revealed by their actions in that  7  J.B. Say, Traité d'économie politique, 1803. 8  A. Marshall, Principles of Economics, 1890. BIS Review 8/2005  5  marketplace.