Hi Kalena,  :-)
  Something caught my eye that I would like to comment on,,,

True, but if someone had pointed you in the direction of that car
salesman as being highly ranked among the possible sea of car
salesmen, you'd likely not be too impressed with that someone's
opinion.

Right, but should Google highly rank a site like that?  Of course not
but if that site abuses what Google uses, in part, to rank sites or
even to index them in the first place, where PageRank seems to be more
important, it would seem that something needs to be done to weed out
those kinds of sites.

The other problem is, Google can't read.  What may be obvious to you
or I may not be so obvious to a bot.

That would be nice but I think bots would have to become a lot smarter
than they are currently because they would, in effect, have to
evaluate content on its own merits which means they would have to
understand what they are reading.

On the other hand, I'm with Halfdeck, and have been about as long as
this whole paid link thing has been around. If site wide links can be
detected and dealt with, excessive reciprocal linking detected and
dealt with, spam-dexing links seemingly ignored, why can't the same
apply to paid links?  Why can't they just be ignored or otherwise
dealt with?

I can understand the concept of devaluing one's stripe of green bits
to make the selling of links less profitable to those who do that but
wouldn't a simpler answer just be getting rid of the green bits?

Personally, I don't really have a horse in this race.  I don't buy or
sell links and in the areas that I use search, I'm mainly searching
among authority sites of which there are no equal so I don't see a lot
of link buying or selling influence so my point of view may be skewed.

Craig