Politicians and their followers can argue over who's at fault for the handling of Hurricane Katrina, and surely there's plenty of blame to go around. But there's plenty of credit that's due too.

Disasters can bring out the best in an awful lot of people, and the outpouring of donations to help the victims of Katrina is proof positive: It wouldn't be surprising if the majority of households nationwide have given something, and many are giving a lot more than the token couple bucks. Volunteers to provide major relief, including housing for total strangers, can probably be found in virtually every city and town.

Best of all, it didn't take huge organized media campaigns to drum up this support (which isn't to say that such campaigns have been in short supply). Most of us wanted to give before anyone asked us, and we're grateful we didn't have to look long to find charities to help. And it's fueled, by and large, by the most basic of motives: caring and compassion.

This is always heartening to see. It's also rather revealing, especially to those of us who follow politics even casually. In politics, you hear lots of talk about caring and compassion. But there's nothing like seeing the genuine article to illuminate the difference between what's real and what's phony.

Every election season, candidates make great shows of concern for people who are having a tough time, whether it's day-care children or nursing-home denizens or women in the labor force or unemployed factory workers. There's always a camera crew present, which is one obvious reason to question whether a candidate's chief motive is his burning desire to help the downtrodden. Somehow you can never imagine him (or her, as is often the case) dropping by to visit these folk anonymously, with no fanfare and no calls to the media.

Yet if the candidate is being self-serving, that may not be the worst part. The worst part may be that he or she usually is touting government programs as the very definition of caring and compassion. The rhetoric goes like this: Because we must be a caring society, I support increases in federal funding for (fill in name of victim group). Should the candidate's opponent call for even a modicum of fiscal restraint, much less question the wisdom of the big- government approach in principle, he'll be denounced as callous, uncaring and (probably) concerned only for "the rich."

Leaving aside the merits of the opposing candidates, this rhetoric couldn't be more misleading.

You can argue for some government programs on the grounds that they're necessary, and that no other alternatives will do: The argument may be wrong in many cases, but it's not inherently dishonest. You can't, however, seriously claim that any government programs are driven by compassion. Compassion, as I'm wont to point out, is voluntary by definition; coerced compassion is a contradiction in terms. And there's nothing voluntary about government. Government, by nature, is all about coercion: You pay up, or else. That brute fact doesn't change whether a state is popular or unpopular, a democracy or a dictatorship; it's still forcing some people to pay into programs they didn't choose to fund on their own. Those who run the state know this full well. They don't settle for inviting folks to contribute to even the most (allegedly) popular programs. They'd never consider setting the precedent.

Again, you can argue over whether force is necessary in a given case. You can argue over whether it's wise or just. But you can't get away with the Orwellian claim that force is choice. Force can at best restrain vice, but it cannot create any virtue — not compassion, not charity, not love. And to pretend otherwise is likely to end up making a mockery of those very virtues.

I got firsthand experience of this reality 20 years ago, when I lived for a time in Washington, D.C. I quickly learned that the city was overwhelmingly cynical, run by politicians and bureaucrats who felt perfectly free to squander millions and billions of dollars, unencumbered by any sense of obligation to the folk back home. Not only were they famously profligate with other people's money, they gave nothing in return. They were consistently and famously unresponsive to the general public: If you needed help, you were out of luck, unless you happened to be (or work for) a Big Shot.

The whole experience was summed up for me one day while riding the subway. The car was mostly empty until it stopped near the largest domestic government agency, what's now known as Health and Human Services around 5:00. A wave of people packed every seat, and from their age and dress as well as the location, it was obvious most were welfare-state employees on the way home from the office — people whose supposed profession was "caring" for "human needs."

At the next stop, a man on crutches got on; now here was a man with human needs. Yet I watched him make his way slowly, with difficulty, from the far end of the car, while not one of the healthy, well-dressed Caring Professionals got up to give him a seat. Finally he reached the back of the car, where I gave him mine. Though I didn't make a show of it, several people gave me dirty looks. It was as if such a minor act of decency had broken the unspoken social rule — Every Man for Himself — and held each of them up to shame. Only instead of hanging their heads guiltily, they were glaring resentfully.

This is what you get when government officially assumes the role of caregiver to the nation: You get not a more caring government, but a more callous "caregiver." To make matters worse, you get a more callous population. Among the evils of the welfare state is that it encourages people to think of caring for the needy as someone else's problem — to think "I pay my taxes, so I've done my part." The result is an attitude less like the Good Samaritan's than the Pharisee who imagines he's attained righteousness by living up to man-made rules.

Still, the corruption of the American public is far from complete. And God, we know, brings good out of evil.

The devastation of Katrina is so vast that, even though everybody knows governmental billions will flow to the Gulf Coast, no one imagines that the government's resources will be nearly enough. Moreover, the need for help is so immediate — and the failures and inadequacies of government at all levels are so obvious — that a lot of people aren't waiting around for the powers that be to "fix" things. They're stepping up to the plate right now with their own time, talents and treasures.

At my church, as in so many churches around the country, people are spontaneously organizing their own trip to the Gulf Coast as well as opening their homes to the victims. Our church and others in our district have adopted particular churches whose pastors and members lost homes in the flood. That means the help will consist not of impersonal bureaucratic contacts, but of person-to-person connections — people working together, talking together, sometimes crying together.

This, surely, is what real compassion looks like. Thank God that He, unlike the government, knows how to breed it in human hearts.