The kings in those times were essentially small businesses. They were personally responsible for those investments as well as their own kingdom’s debt and revenue. Phillip II built the Armada to cut off English attacks on Spanish trade and settlements in the New World. He risked his own money with a promise from the Pope that he would subsudize it if the Spanish won. Instead, Phillip squandered the investment by sending it into the English Channel. It was the English fire ships and Armada immobility that lost the battle. The weather was only a factor in the attempted excape around Scotland. Philip II would later go bankrupt. It was absolutely a business investment gone bad.
Have you ever read Hans-Hermann Hoppe? Your thesis reminds me of his writings.
Okay, the old kingdoms were relative to modern democracies more like businesses. Unlike a president who serves for four or eight years at most the state is the king or prince’s private property. They take care of it their entire lives and attempt to pass it on intact or enlarged to their offspring. They are infinitely less likely to squander the nation’s wealth as compared to the governments which merely stand in for the people. Not that they could squander it had they wished, given their limited control over the nobility.
I balk at calling the Spanish empire small, if a business at all. It was a multinational conglomerate if anything. But let us drop the analogy. It was only a businesslike relative to other forms of government. There remains a fundamental distinction between the political means of enrichment and the economic means. If the king’s relationship with his lords was quasi-voluntary and akin to private citizens now buying security guards or P.I.s, in the very least its rival England was not like a competitor for marketshare. Coca Cola does not send people over to slit Pepsin employees’ throats (or at least not on such a scale).
I don’t doubt that trade was involved, nor that Spain lost money. But trade war is war, and investing in implements of killing is not a business investment. It is a war investment. Do not let the interrelations of economy and warfare blind you to the difference between trading and killing.
By the way, I don’t deny that the English victory was thanks to English virtues in addition to bad Spanish luck. Only the single instance shouldn’t settle the armada’s usefulness for all time.