The Chicago School believed that large firms are needed to manufacture goods at the lowest cost per unit. They point out that until Henry Ford introduced the assembly-line production of automobiles, few people could afford cars. Many small businesses are economically inefficient, they say, and attempts to preserve them through antitrust policy will be underwritten by consumers in the form of higher prices. The Chicago School also insists that if U.S. manufacturers are not allowed to merge and participate in joint ventures, they will be unable to compete with large foreign multinationals and foreign companies owned or subsidized by their governments. One of the reasons the Justice Department moved to dismiss an antitrust suit against the International Business Machines Corporation in 1982 was that the computer market had become international in character since the original government complaint against IBM in 1972. If IBM had been broken up, it would not have been able to compete with large foreign multinationals either in the United States or in other countries.