A general sentiment regarding where he would place a slider on a simplistic one dimensional scale of financial incentive vs disincentive.

Right; and he was wanting to place it to the right of zero (on the "disincentive" side) whereas you were talking about moving it from the left of zero to zero. This is the distinction I was pointing out.

Come to think of it your status quo claim is way off. The following is definitely not the status quo:

Don't subsidise the field at all via grants or via university tax breaks.

See the very comment you linked, which contains a reminder that my "status quo" remark did not apply to that aspect.

By paying inspectors to come to people's houses to check whether they've drawn any pictures that day?

Taxation and subsidisation are well understood. This objection is silly (your other soldiers are better).

The main point of that was to emphasize transaction costs of taxation. You will note that I immediately followed it by a more "reasonable" suggestion so as to forestall accusations of being overly rhetorical.