Thomas James DiLorenzo grew up in western Pennsylvania, descended from Italian immigrants. In an autobiographical essay he attributes his early commitment to individualism to "playing competitive sports." His view of politicians in the small western cities of the state was that they were in it for personal aggrandizement. He thought his family and neighbors worked hard and perceived other people getting advantages from the government. As a youth in the 1960s, he began to think that the "government was busy destroying the work ethic, the family, and the criminal justice system." Although too young to worry about the Vietnam War draft, he concluded that other young men turned themselves inside out to avoid it, or came back silenced by what they had done and seen. These conclusions led him to the opinion that politics were "evil".