Chapter nineteen is the most aggressive passage in the book. Cut off sagehood and throw away knowing, and the people will benefit a hundredfold. Cut off benevolence and throw away rightness, and the people will go back to devotion and care. Cut off cleverness and throw away profit, and there will be no more thieves.
Three pairs, six terms, and each is a good in the vocabulary of one or another school of the period. Sagehood and knowing belong to the general prestige of the learned. Benevolence and rightness are the Confucian core. Cleverness and profit belong to the calculating statecraft the book attacks elsewhere.
The chapter then concedes that these three formulations are not enough on their own, being merely ornaments, and supplies something for people to hold to: see the plain, embrace the uncut block, reduce what is private and make cravings few.
The structure is worth noticing. The demolition takes three lines and the replacement takes one, and the replacement is a set of dispositions rather than practices, institutions or rules. That imbalance is characteristic, and it is why the chapter reads as polemic even to readers sympathetic to its argument.
It is also the chapter where the manuscript evidence bites hardest, because the oldest witness to it does not say the same thing.