Chapters eighteen and nineteen are a pair, and reading them together shows the limits of what the book is prepared to offer.
Eighteen is diagnostic. It identifies the appearance of named virtues as a symptom and traces it to a loss. Nineteen is prescriptive and says to cut off sagehood, discard knowing, cut off benevolence, discard rightness, cut off cleverness and discard profit.
Between them they make one argument twice, and it is a genuinely radical one: the entire apparatus of moral instruction is a response to a problem that the apparatus perpetuates. The counterpart argument was being made at the same period by the Confucian schools in the opposite direction, that cultivation is what repairs a fallen situation, and the disagreement is one of the defining fault lines of Warring States thought.
What chapter eighteen does not do is say what to put in place of what it has criticised, and chapter nineteen's answers, hold to plainness, embrace the uncut block, reduce what is private and make cravings few, are dispositions rather than institutions.
That gap is the standing objection to this book as political philosophy, and it has been made by sympathetic readers as well as hostile ones. A text that identifies a real pathology in moral and legal machinery, and offers in its place a recommendation to want less, has said something true and something unimplementable, and the two are hard to separate.