Black hat is where the money is at!!!!
BUT do not put all of your eggs in one basket, as this would be a big mistake when your basket gets crushed.
I have 1 big basket, I call my White Basket. In this basket I have my Golden Goose egg and it is my Company. I WILL NOT black hat this site. I realize that white hat SEO for an international marketing company takes a looooooooong time.
So in the meantime I build separate sites on completely different servers and black hat them to the high heavens. When the site gets penalized, I've got 10 more that are climbing in the SERPs.
So the difference is
Black hat = fast short term money (bulk backlinks, spun content, buying social signals, etc..)
White hat= slow long term money (unique content, no link building strategy, just produce optimized content and share)