Google has proven time and time out that they are dedicated to making money period. Case in point a few months back when they decided to shut down and ban 15,000 Affiliates.
Some of these affiliates were honest hard working, White hat guys trying to make a honest buck.

Paid links are just part of the game. I don’t condon it as a long term strategy. But, for some it is a quick fix.
Google is far from stupid, If you have shown a pattern of 10 links a month and suddenly out of the blue you have 10,000 links. Be prepared for a not so friendly visit from Google.
It has always been a David & Golaith story concerning link building. Why do link building when you can pay a team in India $2.00 an hour to due one way link building 90 hours a week.
This is fact not fiction.
Know one knows what Google’s flavour of the month will be, only Google and our best guesses.
Check out Dan Thies link liberation course if you really want to learn how to due link building the right way without pissing anyone off.
cheers
Brian

Take article marketing for example. Most article marketing content is paid for (to be written) and then self published.

How is that any different?

Google gets to do what it wants i suppose.

Not sure I’d agree ethically about the comment which equated paying for PPC and paying for links for SEO …. I think there’s sufficient clarity of intention for these mechanisms that you are only fooling yourself ethically by equating them ….

my 2 cents …

what does that mean? only one thing – they should forget about having their site in top ten. is that right? no way! and here is when link building business enters. But instead of writing articles and comments with links to our SEO services as a way of promotion/link building it would be easier to pay per link. And note- those paid links are from index pages so way better than having links on the inner pages (though Google indexes those also=)…my conclusion – why not….whatever works!