Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has created another useless union this week, positively thrilling the Canadian press, but in Latin America, there is nothing new about it. So here is the deal:

In Argentina during the 1990s, people used to joke about the extent of something known as ‘the corporate republic’ or ‘corporate state.’ The corporate state is not about companies but the expansion of medieval-guild-like organizations designed to keep individual people out of the system in the name of some exclusive collective. That’s what this new Chavez union is.

But despite what Chavez claims, he’s hardly first to the party. In Latin America, they have already taken it to absurd lengths. You know you have a corporate state when you have a ‘National Hitchhikers’ Union,’ as Argentina once did, before President Carlos Menem got rid of it. Similarly, you know you have a corporate state when your labor union or business group starts with a name like ‘Confederation of…’

These earmarks of the corporate state are actually fascist in origin, and I mean real fascist – with Mussolini pedigree – not the angry term that is hurled around at anything tyrannical. This setup predates Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, and these institutions are found all over Latin America because most of its leaders during the 1940s fell in love with Mussolini – Juan Peron of Argentina worst of them all, and launched – this corporate-state stuff – to imitate him.

That may give you a pretty good idea what is wrong with Latin America and why so many of its democracies fail.

Jorge Bustamante did the most work to expose this in Argentina in the 1990s, and economist Hernando de Soto in Peru contributed to the understanding of the concept, too. This Argentinian blog here, El Opinador Compulsivo, in Spanish, has a strong grasp of it.

But the best expert for U.S. English-speaking Americans on this concept is Alvaro Vargas Llosa, whose new book, Liberty for Latin America: How to undo 500 years of state oppression, is highly recommended reading. Alvaro knows more about this than anyone, and has written an extremely high-intellectual-firepower book that is easy for gringos to read. See here for his book tour to places like Monterey, CA; Peoria, Ill; Houston and San Francisco. If I were you in those areas, I would not miss it.

Hugo Chavez is actively expanding this corporate state in Venezuela. This week, he’s come up with a particularly absurd extension of it: the National Housewives Union. To claim that housework is economically quantifiable and therefore to provide pensions to non-working women. While providing pensions to the elderly poor as a welfare program is one thing, there is a problem with using this union as the sole means of doing it, and to claim that there is economic value in the private labors, defining women as service workers, is a disaster in the making. So what happens when they don’t clean house? Does this make hubby the boss? Can they go on strike? Can they switch to a different union if they don’t like this one? Somehow, economic productivity is not what this is about.

It’s about creating more corporate state. The corporate state in Venezuela now advances apace, ensuring that one more state in Latin America will continue to look like the wretched Latin America we recognize, ever self-destructively decivilizing.

National Housewives’ Union? It’ s so stupid, so useless! Don’t have a cedula or party card for that? Then you are gonna be an unregistered housewife, and we’re gonna have to bust you. Can’t have unregistered housewives running around! Book ’em, Dano!

Hugo Chavez would be so proud.