I think Czech Republic has the best method of dealing with pedophiles; harsh penalties for child abuse, legalized CP possession but not distribution or production, 15 year age of consent. The standard libertarian position seems to be that distribution should be legal as well as possession, with only production outlawed. I can entirely see their logic in that position and could probably be converted to it, but I see distribution as being much more grey area than production (clearly not moral) and posession (clearly not immoral). Certainly paying for production should be illegal, and maybe it is unfair regulation to prevent sites that host CP from charging for bandwidth fees or hosting advertisements, but I think the risk of creating a finanical market in child abuse via distributors as a sort of financial middle man, is substantial. There are also issues with violation of privacy which I think are far better founded in cases of distribution versus simple possession. But I can totally understand the libertarian argument (only production and directly paying for production should be outlawed) on a logical level, and unfortunately I am probably falling victim to emotional reasoning :/. Right now I am certain that the war on CP is largely just another scheme to fill up prison beds, there is no proven correlation between CP possession and child molestation and there are multiple studies claiming both ways. Considering there are numerous examples of fraud from one side of the debate, I tend to automatically discredit their studies when there is any lack of consensus. Pedophilia is simply a chronic mental disorder it is really strange to me when I see people who are so violent and hateful of them. People are not hateful of people with schizophrenia or bi polar disorder are they? As long as pedophiles don't create victims who cares, same way not every heroin user is going to shoot up a gas station for his next fix. They should be allowed to do anything they want that doesn't create victims, and the only even half decent argument against legalized CP possession is violation of privacy, but unfortunately nobody should think that they have a realistic chance of privacy when their photo goes on the internet, and it is the fault of the people who put it on the internet (at least the original poster, possibly secondary as well as per my earlier argument) not the fault of the people who look at it after it is available. CP makes it easy to find pedophiles via traffic analysis, people hate pedophiles from media scare mongering and propaganda that doesn't reflect reality, people want pedophiles to be sent to prison so they feel safer, LE create databases of millions of pedophiles via traffic analysis and then get ever increasing budgets to be able to put larger and larger %s of them in prison. LE budgets increase, new prisons are built, more law enforcement are hired, more parole and probation officers are hired, software companies get massive contracts / benefits for making counter CP tools for investigators, rehabilitation centers get money, government gets an excuse to monitor us all even closer, tons of completely harmless people go to prison to get a few bad ones. It's such a familiar story.