Goodness Tainted

Near the end of Economy there is a claim about how goodness smells, and it is, Kaag says, the strangest sentence in the chapter. Thoreau says the worst sorrow in life is watching something good get spoiled, and then he turns on the one group nobody dares to question: the do-gooders. Kaag has a story about his daughter and a kindergarten teacher that still makes him angry, and it belongs here. So does Plato's oldest thought experiment, a farmer, a buried ring, and what you are when no one can see you. By the end Thoreau has a diagnosis for the philanthropist, and it is not a flattering one.