I don’t see any conflict of having your own plane(s) and being member of a club. If there are, it’s 100% due to some barriers that only exists inside someone’s head.
If the club has planes, they have to be payed for. The income of a club is the hourly fee. A club needs to stay solvent. A private plane is purely an expense. This poses some restrictions on a club that doesn’t exist with a private plane.
Clubs work well for what they are good at. That is a school and rental for local trips. For other stuff people are better off getting their own planes, which is what people do.
The problems with that is it causes lots of barely used planes collecting dust and taking up space.
A mix is therefore the best.
I don’t see any conflict of having your own plane(s) and being member of a club
The politics flows like this: an owner-pilot is likely to have (or soon get) vastly more experience than the “club instructor/president” and this dilutes the authority of those people.
Clubs work well for what they are good at. That is a school and rental for local trips. For other stuff people are better off getting their own planes, which is what people do.
I agree with that.
In Scandinavia and, as I understand, Germany and France, aeroclubs are normally democratic associations while in the UK they are normally commercial enterprises where members are really customers.
We’ve done that bait many times 
I’d like to know how a “democratic institution” does not need money to pay expenses.
Peter wrote:
We’ve done that bait many times I’d like to know how a “democratic institution” does not need money to pay expenses.
It needs to pay expenses but not the owners and not to repay the loan used to buy the aircraft.
Before this thread goes into societies & political debates (for anyone who is voting this Sunday), here are few well functioning aeroclubs for touring in France, as one can see their aircraft are well priced IFR good touring machines
https://aeroclub.fr/tarifs/
http://www.sadilecointe.net/tarifs.htm
https://aeroclub-atcf.com/index.php/la-flotte
https://sites.google.com/view/caa-asso/tarifs
These have different setup to the typical school/aeroclub which is mostly about grassroots vintages or basic PPL training
Peter wrote:
I’d like to know how a “democratic institution” does not need money to pay expenses.
Expenses was not what we were discussing, but rather restrictions on rental. I was replying to Malibuflyer’s comment “When the members want the ability of longer trips with less flight time, the club will allow it.” which was also quoted in my post. That’s not true if the club is a commercial enterprise where the members have a customer relationship.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to have tried catching with any “bait.”
There is no difference. The club president (of a club formed as a “charitable operation”, a “sporting body”, or whatever it is called to get tax concessions) has the same “interest” in a plane not getting wrecked as the owner of a club formed as a limited company. And same with utilisation; both need controls on “hoarding”. These issues exist everywhere and has never been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. They can be addressed adequately in favour of low time flyers (with high time flyers subsidising them) or they can be addressed adequately in favour of high time flyers (with low time flyers subsidising them). Whichever way you pitch it, one or the other will be complaining they can’t go anywhere because they can’t get a plane, etc. My “bait” comment refererred to this having been discussed many times and it just goes off on a tangent, with implied assertions that in some places money grows on trees. But money doesn’t grow on trees anywhere.
Peter wrote:
The club president (of a club formed as a “charitable operation”, a “sporting body”, or whatever it is called to get tax concessions) has the same “interest” in a plane not getting wrecked as the owner of a club formed as a limited company.
Indeed. The difference is that in a democratic association, the members have the final say. (They also have a shared interest in not getting planes wrecked or underutilised.) They can simply overrule the club president or depose him/her. If they have a customer relationship they can not. They can of course vote with their feet, but that in itself doesn’t force a change and also means that they have to give up something unless there is a convenient and better alternative which makes it a step many would not be prepared to take.
My “bait” comment refererred to this having been discussed many times and it just goes off on a tangent, with implied assertions that in some places money grows on trees. But money doesn’t grow on trees anywhere.
Well, it only does if someone wants to turn the discussion in that direction. I don’t.
Back to the topic, the place in Toussus I used to rent for IFR international trips (after I moved from UK to France and sold my shared aircraft) has now stopped private rental: they wanted to concentrate on their CPL/ATPL, they had a nice fleet of C172S, SR22, DA42 and all aircraft were max 10 years old and well equipped, they were pricey but rental terms were flexible (I could fly aircraft at 22pm on Friday and bring it back at 22pm on Sunday), I think at the end of the day, it’s offer & demand?
the members have the final say
They can of course vote with their feet
Indeed 
There is no difference. Take the average [ insert your favourite activity, not GA ] club. Fills up with boring self-important old farts and gradually people get tired of rolling their eyes at the meetings, leave, sometimes starting another one. The formal structure of the setup makes no difference. Well, it might make a difference to the ability to extract one’s original investment, and pure renters tend to have no investment so they can walk away easily.
the place in Toussus I used to rent for IFR international trips (after I moved from UK to France and sold my shared aircraft) has now stopped private rental: they wanted to concentrate on their CPL/ATPL, they had a nice fleet of C172S, SR22, DA42 and all aircraft were max 10 years old and well equipped, they were pricey but rental terms were flexible
I used to run a “zero equity” setup and found out pretty quick that the challenges are just the usual “human challenges”. And I used to allow people to book unlimited time away! £80/hr dry! (2002-2006)
What I find interesting is how much more difficult the situation is here compared with the clubs I was a member of in the US, which universally allowed multi-day trips with a 2 or 3 hour per diem minimum. Every club I was a member of had its bread and butter training aircraft (C172s mostly, but sometimes BE23s, PA28s, or even Alarus) and then something more complex/expensive/weird like an AA-5B, the lone Piper in a Cessna fleet, or an RG version that most people weren’t checked out in. I always got checked out in whatever that was, because it was mostly available. And I would fly weekend trips 3-4 hrs away to make the per diem worth it. Here I haven’t found anything like this.
