Yep. It's a great book, first of... very, very long book, but great.

The gist is that the great thinkers of the world, great inventors, writers, engineers, leave the world behind (actually, they don't physically leave the world, they just leave their jobs and homes and disappear). They leave the world in the hands of men that can't think for themselves, that get where they are by taking and breaking favors. The world, well... ends, for lack of a better term. Society fails completely. And once the way is clear, and the men of favors (the moochers they call them) have all gone from the world, the men of thought return to rebuild.

It's a WHOLE lot more philosophical than that, and it's based on a whole thought process called Objectivism, but the above is basically what the story's about.

Your theory just made me think of it.