Buying links helps. You just have to know what to buy about half of the links for sell have fake
PR and other problems buying bad links can hurt you but if you are careful in what you buy you can move your site up.
I agree with John buying relevant links is nessesary to rank for the most competitive words
Overdoing it can hurt you too especially if you buy bad links. you must be careful what you buy.
Link buying can be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing and over do it.
A few carefully selected links are more powerful then thousands of randomly selected links