Terry Pratchett is rightly remembered as one of the great modern fantasy writers. As a kid, I'd initially dismissed him as one of the glut of humorous fantasists (along with Craig Shaw Gardner, Lionel Fenn, Robert Asprin, etc), and while some of his early books fit the bill, he eventually developed Discworld into something brilliant, a bunch of series-within-a-series books focusing on various satirical elements (along with witty writing and surprisingly deep characters).
Like many satirists, pinning down his politics is a bit tricky, since he's cynical about everything, but his humanist and anti-authoritarian streaks have generally caused him to resonate with libertarians as well as the libertarian-left. His main focus was on showing flaws in the current system, though, as opposed to suggesting solutions, which has allowed his work to resonate with folks far and wide.
My favorite of the series-within-the-series is the "City Watch" one, which focuses on a barely-funded police force in a chaotic and very corrupt fantasy city1. Sergeant Sam Vimes, the main protagonist, is gruff, cynical, and still at his core an idealist, and he manages to channel classic Chandler/Hammett tropes in this setting.
That's a really long intro to three small paragraphs. In the second of the City Watch books, Men at Arms, Vimes has a musing that's become one of the most famous passages from Pratchett, a quote that perfectly exemplifies how the rich are able to actually save more money than the poor. Others have made the observation in plenty of ways -- Pratchett didn't pretend otherwise -- but I'm not sure anyone's made it as succinctly or in such an accessible way.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Footnotes
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The city of Ankh-Morpork itself is one of Pratchett's most brilliant creations; most fantasists avoid cities altogether, stopping development at towns, while the few exceptions are largely very medieval; Pratchett created a fantasy city that was thoroughly modern, allowing him to explore concepts from technological change (Moving Pictures is literally about the development of movies within a fantasy setting2, while Going Postal explores the need for communication as a world develops beyond just the classic trope of ravens carrying messages). ↩
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It also gives us the classic line about popcorn: "If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." ↩